


Modus Operandi

by 2bee



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, BAMF John, F/M, Guns, John-centric, M/M, Mild Gore, Post Reichenbach, The Empty House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-23 23:19:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2bee/pseuds/2bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>But this, this is what you're really addicted to. You'd do anything—anything at all to stop being bored.</i>
</p><p>After Sherlock's death, John picks up a new hobby like a habit. Watsons, after all, have always had predispositions for dangerous things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modus Operandi

**Author's Note:**

> This fic started as a gift for [Amber](http://sassiarty.tumblr.com) probably more than eight months ago, because I am the worst person alive. Somehow, it turned into this highly self-indulgent behemoth. I hope it at least somewhat resembles what you were originally thinking. I'd also like to snuggle [Erica](http://treesong.tumblr.com) and [Orpheus](http://uncleorpheus.tumblr.com), who I had in mind while writing probably half of this, although neither of them knew it.
> 
> I had something else written here for [Jenny](http://augustbird.tumblr.com), but I'm revising it because without her, I'm genuinely not sure if this ever would have gotten finished. She forced me to write, and reassured me that it wasn't awful, and talked to me.. almost constantly, for some reason,and was genuinely the best cheerleader that anyone could have asked for, and also, I'm now, like... over a month late for your birthday. So clearly I don't deserve you, but I'm going to stop writing you a love letter because I'm being really shmoopy... ya chump.
> 
> I really wasn't expecting to write long fic when I started this, and it's my first time doing so, so please be gentle with me.

 

John had always liked gambling. He’d been good at it, too.

When John was fourteen he snuck out through his bedroom window to bet his savings on a poker game. He was going to buy his mother a ring with a ruby in it, because his father had just broken her heart. 

His advantage was that he seemed so guileless: his face so open and honest and young. When he was concentrating hard, his tongue would poke out between his teeth, and those older than him were foolish enough to mistake it for a tell.

He tripled his savings over the course of the evening. He also got the living shit beat out of him, but that’s what happens when you go up against boys well past puberty. He held onto his money and bought the ring. He’d even had extra left over.

*

It had been thrilling, not knowing whether or not he’d lose. A girl with a piercing in her nose who must have been at least eighteen had ruffled his hair and kissed his ear as she passed him free beers under the table. A twenty-four -year-old by the name Brilling, who barely spoke to anyone, had smirked at him. John had been oddly pleased by that. He had defended him whenever someone had said he was cheating. He was the one who’d broken up the fight, who pulled apart the crowd after the table had been overturned, and made sure that John had had all of his money. 

After, standing outside the cellar door, he had smoothed his rough right hand over John’s face and inspected the bruises.

 “You’ll be fine,” he said. His voice was deep in a way John’s wasn’t yet. “People are afraid of people who’ve been battered up, it means you survived something.”

John had swallowed. 

“Don’t come back here, kid. You got lucky tonight, that’s it. Gambling will fucking ruin you.”

John nodded, but by then, he was well beyond listening.

*

He didn’t gamble again until university, but he practiced. He read about different games and the best hands and memorised everything he could for the next opportunity he had to win himself more. He got fantastic at bluffing. He learned that talking less was the fastest way to secure power over people. He used gambling to pay his way through medical school, smoking cigars in cramped dorm rooms and reciting parts of the body with his partners as they passed pounds over textbooks.

Until, of course, the evening where it all went wrong.

He called Harry. Harry was a drinker, prone to self-destructive choices, but she was smart. She was smart, and she knew how to cheat, and she knew how to cheat without being caught. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Watson.”

“Do you remember the time you found that dog underneath the fence, and you kept it in your room, and I covered for you for eight months and pretended I’d had mad cow until Mum was about ready to kill herself?”

Silence on the other end of the line. He thinks he can hear another voice in the background, groaning. Harry shushes her.

“I’ve found a way for you to return the favor.”

*

She was in London within the hour.

Harry was beautiful: her hair like John’s but a shade darker and traveling all down her back in a slight wave. Their eyes were the same. She had her mother’s nose and lips, petite and full, respectively, and her father’s height, temper, and drinking habits. 

“How the _fuck_ do you lose twenty thousand pounds in one go?” 

“It wasn’t _one_ go, exactly, it—”

“I don’t even fucking care, Jesus Christ. And _this_ is how you’ve been doing it? Paying for school and everything?”

John nodded. And Harry, of all things, _laughed._  

“Oh, God. Naturally.” 

“What do you mean, naturally?” 

“You’re a Watson, John,” Harry had said, taking a swig from her hip flask. “You were bound to have a predisposition for something extremely dangerous.”

*

After Harry wins him his money back, he promises himself he won’t ever gamble again. 

And if he plays a few games to supplement his pension while in Afghanistan, well. 

Nobody even has to know about that.

*

A bomb has blown the faces off of seven buildings on either side of the street and all that John can hear are the sounds of scattered gunfire, punctuated by agony. It’s peculiar, looking down a street and being able to see inside everything: an invasion of privacy, almost. Half a dozen dollhouses bathed in unrelenting Afghani sun – dollhouses filled with blood and mangled bodies. 

Sweat has pooled on the back of his neck between skin and uniform to the degree that he thinks it may be possible to spoon it into his cupped hand and drink it. Flies are collecting. Flies always swarm where there is sweat or death, or both. Sticking in pools of blood by kitchen floors, their feet lingering on shattered heads and torn open torsos. Crouched for cover in a living room, staring at a disembodied arm as he waits for the all-clear, John does not close his eyes. 

The skin of the arm’s severed edge is frayed with muscle winding out from it like an undone cassette tape. How much force would it take to rip apart a tendon? The pool of blood near it is small, dripping from the open end like a leak from a car with spatter across the floor of the room leading to it—it was ripped off – sawed into, pulled apart – the victim was likely alive as they did it – they’d probably slapped her with it – thrown it across the room – the fingers are so delicate, she’d just painted her nails – 

John chokes on his own breath. He turns his face and looks out into the street. People are running. 

Here’s how it is done:

Move in. Quickly. Find someone alive, find anyone, alive. Save them. You’d save your enemies if it meant you could save them. Keep one finger on the trigger and have good aim – you do, you’re half marksman, you shoot holes through apples on days off – save your own skin. Save the country’s skin. You’re a moralist. You’ve got a gun, you’re killing people. People are trying to kill you. 

Wyatt was handsome and young with a rude sense of humour who gave John the nickname ‘three continents Watson.’ He was always the one to steal a second dessert from the mess hall and he had a terrible habit of challenging everyone to pool and losing miserably. Had he the time in the morning (he rarely did), he’d spend half an hour fiddling with his hair. Even in the battlefield, he’d walk with an uncalled for swagger that, in John’s opinion, was downright undignified. Endearing, but overwrought and half dangerous. But it boosted morale. 

He’s been shot in the gut. He’s boneless, John’s gripping him under the arms. Digestive acid is spilling out of his stomach and eating his insides. He’ll be dead in forty minutes, max.

He’s slurring his words, shaking like a child, staring at a screaming woman holding a bloody bundle. John pulls him backwards, Wyatt’s combat boots stuttering uselessly along the warped, bloodstained floorboards, and John stumbles against a staircase that comes earlier than he expects it to. He strains his leg. He pauses. Wyatt keeps repeating himself.

“It doesn’t have a head.” The woman is screaming. She’s so loud that John hears her as though he’s very far away, or underwater. “It doesn’t have a head. Cap— Cap, it doesn’t—Doc—Doc Watson—”

John grunts, hauls Wyatt’s dead weight further into his chest. “Get a grip on yourself.” 

“It’s just a baby—we killed a baby—” 

“It wasn’t us.” He walks backwards down the stairs. 

“It doesn’t have—it doesn’t have—Doc—Captain—” 

John’s right hand is sticky with blood from where Wyatt’s been shot. A crack of gunfire and John instinctively ducks, pulling Wyatt with him, and half a second later bullets are raining in above him and into the wall. One-handedly grabbing his rifle, he shoots blind in the direction from where they came, relying on nothing more than hope as he pulls the trigger.

He’s never felt more alive. It’s terrible, and he’s never felt more alive. Only— 

And then Wyatt is moaning, and his voice is dropping octaves and his head is bloody, his hair is getting longer and growing dark and John’s stomach drops and he’s been here before and he’s not going to let this happen and he’s not—he’s wearing his coat— “Sher—” 

His body is torn full of holes as he’s riddled with bullets. He feels each one like a car crash; it hurts to be shot.

John wakes up in his bed trembling. He stumbles into the loo, half blind with sleep and still shaking, his bad leg screaming in protest, and he just barely manages to vomit into the sink. He turns both taps on full blast and fills his hands with water, drowning his face in it. The water runs down his wrists and his chin and through his fingers. He can see the fluorescent bathroom light through the cracks. 

He tries not to sob. He tries.

*

In the end, he’d never quit anything. He’d just been substituting one vice for another. Gambling, the army, Sherlock Holmes. 

His therapist had picked up on it the second he told her – “Was enlisting a way for you to continue? Gambling with your own life?” 

John admits that he hadn’t thought of that. Two months later, he meets Sherlock Holmes and stops seeing Ella altogether.

*

The washing machine in Baker Street breaks and floods half the downstairs with soapy water and soaking laundry. John stands in the doorway, shoes getting wet, before gathering the clothes up piece by piece and putting them in a bag to take to a Laundromat. 

He watches the clothes tumble over each other for forty minutes. A tan man with curly hair bumps into him on his way out, and that’s the only thing that happens.

*

Caring is avoided in the army; that’s how it’s done. There is a strict line between camaraderie and friendship and very few are foolish enough to cross it, and if they succeed once they tend never to try again. They learn their lesson by burning their hands on the stove. They drop to their knees and cradle their heads between their forearms while everyone around pretends not to see them.

It is these men, of course, who come back broader, who are broken down and built up again into a more solid structure, who pull triggers with precision that can be mistaken for vengeance to the unpracticed eye. This isn’t the case, of course. While a burnt hand may be the best teacher, one does not grow to love the scars.

One is not taught to love, in the army. It would be counterproductive to the ultimate goal. In the army, you iron yourself over until you are dark as sin for nothing more than your cause and country.  You do not miss men: you kill them. You do not touch your fellow man, you do not love them. You make martyrs of men when you love them. To make a martyr of a man is always a mistake. 

John had always been careful. He’d even kept slices of his own integrity, cutting morals into his routine. Queen and country. He’d always been so careful.

He’d let his guard down when he got back to London. And now: just like everybody else. Hands gripping at the back of his head. He hopes that nobody sees him.

*

While standing in the checkout section buying groceries, John thinks about reenlisting. He’d be able to do it, he thinks. Mycroft certainly owes him a favor.

*

“Inspector Lestrade.” 

“Greg! Hi! It’s—it’s, ah, John.” 

The shift of Lestrade’s voice from professional to bedside manner is almost tangible. “John, hi. It’s—it’s been a while. How are you… holding up?” 

John brushes by the question as if it hadn’t been asked. “Listen, I…” God, it had seemed like a perfectly fine idea at the time. “I know that – you know, protocol and everything – but I – I just, if you have any crime scenes – murders, that aren’t, I don’t know, pressing, if I could – I don’t need to, but I’ve been thinking about it, I just – I mean, I know I wouldn’t really have anything to add, but if I could just – ” 

Lestrade finally catches on and puts him out of his misery. “I wish I could,” he says, and John knows that he doesn’t at all. “I really do, but after this whole mess—I’ve been in court four times this month alone, I—” 

“I get it.” John squeezes his eyes shut and pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, I get it. Of course. This was a stretch, I didn’t really – I just—” 

“We should get a pint sometime. I miss—” 

“Yeah. Yeah, sounds great. I’ll text you.”

*

John doesn’t text him.

*

He has to actively stop himself from thinking about Sherlock. Whenever he can’t distract himself, he names parts of the brain, or says the alphabet backwards. When those tasks become too easy, he starts listing the bones of the body by length, and then in reverse order from when they are developed.

People in Tesco look at him like he’s mad, but there you are.

*

He hates having to go out and get himself another cane. He’d gotten rid of his old one. The moment had felt so victorious.

His tremor comes back, too, and he’s so bloody incompetent that he can’t even put a plastic lid on his fucking coffee after waiting in line for it for twenty minutes and he abandons it, right there on the counter, before someone can come up to him and ask if he needs help.

*

She’s watching him. She’s eyeing him appreciatively as he stares at the different types of peanut butter (chunky, extra chunky, smooth, extra smooth, smooth and crunchy, crunchy, chocolate twist, nutty chocolate twist, extra crunchy nutty chocolate twist with caramel—) and tries not to think about killing himself.

“Hi.”

John smiles tersely. She’s gorgeous, brown, curly hair down to her elbows, light blue eyes, remarkably fit and dressed way too well for a trip to the supermarket. He thinks briefly about chatting her up, and then revels in the fact that he genuinely does not care.

“I _said,”_ she says, stepping closer and sliding her hand around his waist, “ _hi.”_

She has John’s attention. “Hi.”

“Are you John Watson?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard you’re a crack shot, Doctor Watson,” and John wants to step away but the grip her hand has on his waist grows tighter.

“Who—”

“A friend,” she says, and she hands him a business card. There is very little written on it, and there is an address written in pencil on the back. “I want to see your valuable skills flounder about as much as you do.”

“If you think that I’m just going to—”

“You don’t have to show up,” she says simply, shaking her head and stepping back. “In fact, I encourage you not to. We’re in a dangerous line of work. But if you like—” she takes two more steps back and nods her head in the vague direction of the card in John’s hand, “show up at that address in a week. Doesn’t matter the time. We’ll wait.”

She’s walking backwards down the aisle, and John only just notices that his hand isn’t shaking when she speaks again.

“And don’t worry,” she says, swaying, “if you do refuse, after this, we’ll never contact you again.”

She says it as though she wants to alleviate his troubles, but by the time John has returned to Baker Street he is utterly convinced that it’s a threat.

*

Upon closer inspection, John finds that the business card is embossed with the letter ‘M’ and it makes him nearly sick to think that Mycroft is still chasing after him to do his dirty work. But he’s nearly ready to kill in order to get himself some excitement, so a week later, after staring blankly at the wall with his jaw set and his fingers threaded together, he slips his gun into the back of his jeans and sets off for the given address.

When he gets there, he finds that no one is waiting for him. He is in an enormous, empty warehouse, the only visible item of interest is a box on a table placed near the building’s center.

John half-jogs to it, glancing around, half-expecting some sort of ambush, _something._ If it weren’t for the package, he’d think he’d have come to the wrong address. He still somewhat suspects it. There are no instructions on the box, no note, no nothing. John wonders if he needs to open it. He picks it up, weighing it in his hand. His phone beeps in his pocket. He puts the box down and checks  it – it’s a text from a restricted number.

 

                _63 New Cavendish Street_

_Do not be seen._

 

John is tempted to feel exasperated. New Cavendish Street is on the bloody opposite side of London.

                  _Couldn’t have chosen a closer warehouse, could you? I am a cripple, you know._

It’s only after he types it does he realise that he’s left his cane back at the flat.

*

It’s a bit difficult, not being seen, especially with all the CCTV about, and John isn’t even sure if he’s supposed to avoid those or not, if this is an assignment from Mycroft.

Lying in bed, John does not think about Sherlock. Instead, he toys with his phone in his hands, finally deciding to send another text to the restricted number.

                _You disappointed me. Thought that would be a bit more fun._

There is a response almost immediately. John would hate the way his heart speeds up automatically, the fact that somehow he cannot contain the excited smile that crosses his face in anticipation, but he doesn’t even care. 

                _Give it time._

*

John is given two more delivery jobs over the course of the month, one assigned to him via text, the other, a note taped to the door of his bedroom. The note thrills him more than it should and he is not nearly scared enough for even his own liking.

*

Another woman – similar looking to the one from Tesco but not quite the same, taller and paler with perhaps a slightly darker shade of hair – walks up to him in the park to talk him through his next assignment. It sounds an awful lot like robbery, but she assures John that if he does it right, there’s absolutely no chance of him being caught.

His disguise arrives on the Baker Street doorstep the next day – he’ll be playing a chef at a restaurant that apparently fronts for a smuggling ring. He justifies that it’s not exactly stealing if you’re stealing something _back,_ though he’s not quite positive that whoever he’s working for is the original owner of the object, either.

At the restaurant, John meets a man who calls himself Davis who speaks of their employer with an awed sense of respect. Together, they haul three crates full of ancient trinkets into a waiting van over the course of the evening. John doesn’t know how he feels about Davis; he’s scrawny and young, and has a beard growing in in patches the way some young men who are trying and failing to look older do.

At the end of the evening, John does as he’s told and stripes himself of his uniform and sets it on fire in the alley one street away from the restaurant. Davis comes with him, and he smiles. “I think I’m going to keep this hat as a souvenir. First time doing a proper job for the boss and all that, this really is such a powerful organization, I bet in a few jobs we’ll be changing the world, did you know that—”

A bullet goes straight through the boy’s head. Some of the blood splatters onto John’s face, and he reels back, falling against the bins as he watches Davis’ twitching body slow to nothing.

John’s phone signals a new text.

                 _I hate people that talk too much. :)_

*

John used to dream about lions. He would operate on them, kneeling in the sand, surgical scissors cutting up the middle of thick skin while the sun burnt the back of his neck as he slowly spread the body open, limbs reaching. He’d reach in and root around in its organs, the blood hot, staining his arms, slowing his fingers, bubbling out and splashing onto him and getting into his mouth, and everywhere he’d hear the sounds of gunfire. And slowly he’d slice open the stomach and pull out his comrades, and civilians, and his sister, naked and decaying, and when he’d place them next to the lion their bodies would ooze and the sand would stick to them.

He pulls Sherlock out, now. He is thin, so thin, but long, with his limbs bending too easily in every direction and John realises now that he is wearing his coat that sits across his shoulders like the skin of a great cat he’s just cut open. The blood and the stench of dying draws flies and they land on the two of them like a buzzing mass of twitching bees. They make to devour Sherlock. His jaw opens and snaps off in John’s hands.

He wakes up trapped inside his own blankets. He checks to see if the Browning is in his bedside table and stares at the ceiling for the rest of the night.

With his therapist:

“I haven’t been sleeping.” 

“Lions again?” 

John focuses on the potted plant to his immediate right. For some reason the sight repulses him. He swallows. He looks away. 

“Tigers, this time.”

He doesn’t go back to see Ella again.

*

He is sitting at his laptop, staring at his blog wondering if what’s been happening lately merits even a private entry when it happens. He has a chicken cooking in the oven. It’s almost done. There is a creak on the staircase, and that’s his only warning. 

A huge man armed with a lead pipe bursts in the door, and John’s first thought is that he feels alarmingly stupid to be wearing a flannel shirt. 

He’s off his chair in half a second and holding it out like some sort of matador before he is even fully aware of what he’s doing. His gun is locked in his bedside table upstairs. He’s 5’6” in a flannel shirt and up against a hulking ox of a person brandishing a lead pipe, who is watching John with his chair with a look of bemused astonishment on his face.

“This is pathetic. I was expecting you’d put up something of a fight.” 

“I wish I could, you know, I really do. But most people don’t expect to be bludgeoned to death on a Tuesday. Didn’t have much time to prepare.” 

And the man advances. 

John does the first thing he can think of and raises the chair above his head to block the first blow, and then the second. He’s knees buckle against the weight but he pushes back, and the third swing aims lower: for his middle. John lowers the chair in an attempt to block it and manages something even better in the process – the pipe gets caught between the stretchers, and John has the leverage to turn the chair and make sure it doesn’t get pulled back. 

Grunting in frustration, the man pushes back on the chair, sending John stumbling. The pipe slips out from between the stretchers and John tries to grab onto it as he falls, but all he manages to do is push it so it rolls beneath the sofa. The man rips the chair out of John’s grasp, throws it behind him like it’s nothing more than a sheet of paper, and kicks John heartily in the stomach. 

“You’re even more of a tit than I thought you would be, you know that?”

John tries to think of something to say, but he’s had the wind knocked out of him. The man pulls him to his feet and wraps one enormous hand around his neck, pressing him into the bookshelf. 

The word ‘Sherlock’ edges into his mind in a panic as he twitches. He’s beyond reason. It’s the only thing he can think. _‘Sherlock, Sherlock—’_

John kicks his feet wildly, spluttering, he hadn’t even had a chance to get his breath back. The man squeezes harder. The edges of his vision are going black.

He kicks again, making contact this time, but the intruder only winces. Desperately, his hands go to the man’s wrists as he tries to break his grip, but he can’t, he _can’t—_

A shrill beeping erupts through the entire flat. John’s chicken has caught fire. 

The would-be assassin’s concentration breaks for just long enough for John to manage half a breath of air and to gain enough stability to kick properly. As the man reels away, John twists both arms outward and behind the man’s back. He doubles over in agony; John thinks he might burst a capillary with the effort of holding him down. 

“Fuck! You little fucking—” The fire alarm continues sounding. John can’t subdue the man like this for long, he’s already having trouble keeping his grip as he twists and thrashes, and as soon as he can straighten himself up, John’s done for. He can’t hold him down, he can barely breathe, hell, until two weeks ago he’d still periodically needed his cane—

 _His cane._ Leaning against the armchair a yard away is his aluminum, hospital-issue walking crutch, and he lunges for it. Before the intruder can even straighten up, John’s beaten him six times over the top of his head and straight into the nape of his neck. The cane’s not heavy, but it’s enough, and it doesn’t take more than a minute to get him unconscious.

He walks into the kitchen. 

The chicken isn’t even on fire, just smoking. John puts on an oven mitt and douses it in water. The smell is disgusting. 

For the first time since his death, John enters Sherlock’s room, and he does so without even thinking about it. He goes straight to his bedside table and pulls out the length of rope that Sherlock keeps in the third drawer. He reenters the living room, ties the man’s hands, then his feet, and then ties the two together. Trussed up like a chicken. 

That done, John takes the stairs two at a time up to his room and throws his essentials into a duffel bag: they aren’t much. After a second’s hesitation, he stuffs Sherlock’s scarf into the bag with the rest of it. He tucks his handgun into the back of his jeans. 

He goes down to 221A, knocks, and waits for Mrs. Hudson. She smiles at him.

“Oh, hello, John, I was just about to come up, it sounded like you were causing quite the ruckus. Burn your dinner again?” 

“Yes, a bit. Listen, we don’t have much time – I – have you got any relatives that need visiting? Maybe for a week, or two?”

The suggestion is pathetic, and he doesn’t even know why he stopped to do this, especially since he’s much more likely to send Mrs. Hudson into terrified hysterics than to actually get anywhere productive. And the madman was bursting in on _him_ , not Mrs. Hudson. But somehow, he still feels the tug of obligation. He nervously shifts his travel bag from one hand to the other and tries to look normal as he nods. 

Mrs. Hudson, of all things, _tuts._ “Has it got something to do with Sherlock, dear?” 

It’s as though the floor disappears from underneath him. “I—I—” He shifts the bag to his other hand and then back again, mouth gaping as he thinks about it. He hasn’t thought about Sherlock in – “I, um—yes. Him. Just a week or two, I just think—” 

“Not a problem at all dear, I know it’s been hard for you. I’ll be on my way.” 

John leaves immediately. The obvious choice is to head straight for a new flat, or, better yet, a deserted flat in a bad part of London for him to squat in – something, anything more anonymous. And he thinks that the further he is from Baker Street, the better, but he does not dwell on why, exactly, he feels the need to be far away.

 Before he can start distracting himself by listing bones, he gets a new text message.

                  _You should have killed him._

 John smirks as he walks.

                  _My gun was upstairs._

 He stares at the readout, waiting for a reply. He walks two streets like that, bumping into several people, before thinking that maybe that was the end of the conversation. And then:

                  _He very kindly brought a lead pipe for you._

 Somehow, amazingly, John laughs.

                  _I don’t like killing people._

 This time, the response is immediate.

  _Learn to._

*

His first hit is easy. He doesn’t even have to go through the trouble of finding an arms dealer in order to buy a rifle: it comes with the assignment, right in a box with bullets and a bag and leather gloves and a cell phone that he’s apparently supposed to throw in the Thames the moment he’s done with it. John sits in his new flat and can’t keep himself from chuckling – it’s like some sort of Do-It-Yourself Assassination kit.

The target is a male in his late forties, single, closely cropped ginger hair that sticks up at the back. John thinks he might work in politics, judging by the location of the ‘secret meeting’ he should be leaving within the hour. John hasn’t been given his name – though he will learn in two months that this is not standard operating procedure. It’s important to know as much as one possibly can about the target, to grow intimate with their habits, to catch them at their most vulnerable.

John is so tense that it takes him seven and a half minutes to realize that he’s been trying to put his scope on backwards, and he spends five minutes trying to gauge the wind before finally putting together that there isn’t any. And then he puts together that it’s the perfect night to be out shooting, if there’s no wind, and he lines himself up, and he feels, after months and months of stuttering along half-rusted, like his gears have finally moved into place.

His assignment steps out and John is ready for him. He sights off the glint of the man’s glasses, the way that they reflect the streetlamp as he pauses beneath it to contemplate hailing a taxi. John shoots. It’s exquisite. He forgot, how good he was at this.

If Parliament is short one member the next day, John is none the wiser. He stopped reading the papers ages ago.

*

_Letters to the Editor: 17 th June_

Re: “Suicide of Fake Genius”

_~~Your pathetic excuse~~_

_~~I can’t believe~~_

_~~I was appalled when I~~_

_~~If you honestly think~~_

_~~Sherlock~~_

_~~Sherlock Holmes~~_

_~~Your obituary~~_

_~~He~~_

_~~He~~_

_He_

John hadn’t managed to write anything else. The articles sat there, festering. Lestrade had still been talking to him then, had still had time to be worried.

“I don’t know. I just try not to think about it.” He’d sighed. John could smell smoke on him, lingering around his shoulders like flies. “Bit hard, really, with all that’s going on. I don’t know. Maybe all you need’s a hobby.”

John raised his eyebrows. “Fishing?”

“Just something to get it off your mind.”

*

John uses the money from his next three hits to buy his own rifle. He won’t be able to use it on every job, but it will be nice when he can. There’s very little that’s more comforting than the familiar weight and shape of a gun. 

It also means he can spend his evenings cleaning it.

*

Sometimes, with the marks, he just gets the name and a few vague addresses. John has to research his targets and tail them, figure out when and where to take his shot for it to be under ideal circumstances. John likes these jobs best, because he’s not just sitting around waiting for another assignment, but he still believes that there is nothing more elegant than finding out that someone is alive and having them dead less than an hour later.

He starts having the money he’s earning wired to a private Swiss account, because it’s safer than keeping it under his mattress the way he did in the army. He keeps enough in his wallet to cover meals and cigarettes, because while smoking isn’t his vice of choice, it’s something to do to pass the time. 

He chain smokes two packs while waiting for his most recent mark to move out from behind a fucking pillar.

*

He takes up gambling again. 

He doesn’t, strictly speaking, _mean_ to: it’s just that addictions have a tendency towards mingling with each other. It also doesn’t help that killing people for money isn’t exactly plentiful fodder for friendship, so unless John wants to spend his evenings staring at a wall, he has nowhere else to go. 

And killing people, despite common misconceptions, doesn’t pay that well. Or, it does, but when one’s working for a corporation as opposed to a hit man, the money gets split up more quickly, and nine times out of ten John is asked to supply his own gun, buy his own bullets. If it’s risky to bring his own rifle and he needs a burner, he has to go through his arms dealer, who is a right asshole with three children and a nasty habit of overpricing everything she sells, including cigarettes.

So he needs the money. And once a man becomes a hired gun, it is almost a given that he’s moving in the same circles as some very high profile gamblers. He knows that he’s making excuses. But all John needs is for it to come up in conversation, and it does.

He’s rusty, and he’s forgotten how to play it safe. The first night, he loses eight thousand pounds. The second night, he wins all of it back and then doubles it.

*

The second sniper has already settled in and set up before John even notices they’re there. He’s startled, but he doesn’t fall back, just assesses them with his eyes and goes back to focusing on the target. Darrow is barely visible through the window, there’s a glare. She’s still speaking to her employees, but she looks like she’s wrapping up. John adjusts his rifle. His hands do not shake. 

“You’re not going to ask me why I’m here?” 

The stranger’s voice is higher than expected. John turns and looks. 

Whoever they are, John is immediately reminded of a cat gone feral. White-blonde hair spiking up at all angles, lithe shoulders jutting out even through their cropped jacket, entire body bent into contorted angles that somehow still manage to look smooth. The gun looks enormous in their arms: John wonders briefly if they’re young. A fifteen-year-old sniper. Unbelievable.

“Wasn’t planning on it, no.”

“I would, if I were you,” they say, sticking a cigarette between their teeth and lighting it. The flash of the lighter sparks in the reflective glass of their aviators. “I know that curiosity killed the cat, but in our business...” They trail off, and John tugs nervously at his ear. Their voice has a sophisticated lilt that does not sound young at all, and— 

“Who are you?” The question falls out of his mouth. 

The second sniper peels the black leather glove off of their left hand and extends it forward. John takes it, and after a moment’s hesitance, the stranger nods. “You can call me Moran.” 

“And are you—” 

“A woman?” Pulling back, Moran smiles around the cigarette in a sense of mocking disbelief. John’s eyes fixate on Moran’s wrist as it twists back and forth, squirming its way back into the glove before taking hold of the gun again. “Is your second question to me genuinely going to be, ‘are you a woman?’” 

“Sorry, I just, I… couldn’t tell…” 

“Does it matter?” And like a reflex, Moran’s body goes stiff and fast in one swift move, jaw clenching and fingers tightening right before pulling the trigger. Barely took half a second to sight. John’s tongue darts out to lick his lips, and Moran begins disassembling the gun. “I am, if you must know. And don’t bring your own rifle to jobs like these, if you’re going to be up more than ten stories, bring a burner and be done with it.” 

John doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. Moran takes a gun apart more quickly than anyone he has ever seen. 

“And you are?”

John answers quickly as a matter of habit. “No names, actually.” That was his very first rule. Even when gambling, he uses three or so pseudonyms. He isn’t stupid. 

Pushing the aviators to her forehead, Moran places her chin in her palm and raises her eyebrows.  Looking back at his own now-useless rifle, he pulls it from the sill and wipes it down.

“Anonymity is for mafia members and spy novels, John.” 

John freezes and looks up again. Moran doesn’t take her eyes off her rifle. 

“I’m going to teach you how we work.” 

John hesitates a moment, holding the question in his mouth before he says it. “Why me?”

Moran smirks. “We’ve heard you’re touchingly loyal.” 

The words echo strangely in his head, but he cannot put his finger upon why.

*

He meets Moran next because he is asked to travel to France with her. This notice comes via email, written in code. He’d stared at it for an hour until a restricted number had texted him with three hints on how to break it. 

They take the Chunnel, and Moran refuses to look at him almost the entire way, preferring to text and spin her lighter between her fingers. John doesn’t mind. He hasn’t been to France since he was in his twenties; he’s oddly excited, despite the fact that he knows he’s hardly going to see the sights. Crossing the border with a rifle is a nightmare, but as his instructions promise, neither he nor Moran stopped. He is not even looked at, Moran passes the guards with a practised ease and a small smile that John envies. John’s grateful he’s picked up cards again, because wide eyes and a perfectly practiced poker face are the only additional skills he needs to keep himself from raising suspicion. 

Moran does the majority of the work, and John follows. She is very methodic in the way she works, pointing out the necessary details that John has failed to pick up on before he needs to ask, becoming completely absorbed in the work and the chase and treating her jobs like something majestic. After she takes her shot, John beside her, she turns around and lights a cigarette. She exhales the smoke in a long, thin line, and she turns to John. She smiles. 

John smiles back. He takes her gun apart for her as she smokes, wiping each part down to free it from any stray prints or residue. Then, under the cover of darkness, they go: running down streets and alleys and over rooftops, because in this business, finishing the job is only the beginning. When they take the Chunnel back to England, John tells Moran a story that makes her laugh. 

If she reminds him of someone, John does not acknowledge the connection.

*

They go on five more jobs together before John starts to properly notice things. Moran, for example, tends to like to take her shots at the longest possible range. At first, he thinks that perhaps she’s just showing off, or she likes the challenge. But then it occurs to him that the further off the shot is taken, the less likely it is that they’ll be able to pinpoint the proper origin of the shot. 

He doesn’t posit this theory, for fear of sounding like an overeager schoolboy and also for fear of being wrong, but he incorporates it into his own personal rulebook.

When it is his turn, when Moran backs away from her gun and tells him to adjust the scope, John has to force himself forward to save himself the embarrassment of being surprised. He watches the mark get off the bus, check their watch, and start walking. He counts out ten steps, following them with minute shifts of the gun, and then—

“Well done,” she says, looking at him with an expression of pleasant surprise that John hasn’t even seen on her face before.

The praise follows him back all the way to the flat he’s been sleeping in. It’s not his flat, but it’s empty for the week (family’s gone on holiday), and John’s been growing tired of squatting in places without electricity. He watches about two hours’ worth of crap telly, and the entire time, he cannot shake his stupid, satisfied grin.

*

The next time he sees her, he’s out for an evening jog and she’s pulled up next to him in one of those anonymous white vans that never fail to look suspicious. It doesn’t have any plates. She leans out the driver’s side window.

“What are you waiting for, you fuck, an engraved invitation?” 

He doesn’t need to be told twice. The car slows down just enough so that he can catch it and he climbs in to the passenger seat while it’s still moving. Moran grabs a gym bag from under her seat and throws it into John’s lap. He pulls out a gun, the change of clothes. 

“The clothes are optional,” she says before John can ask, “but you smell and look disgusting, so I recommend them.” 

“No one told me about this,” John says, pulling off his shirt. Moran looks. Her eyes flick to his shoulder. 

“Bringing you was my own decision. Did you get shot?” 

John pauses in pulling on the new shirt and looks at his shoulder. When he turns his head back to her, he raises his eyebrows and can’t help but purse his lips. “Nah. Bear attack.”

She shoves him, too hard to be playful, but John laughs anyway. He does the buttons of the shirt all the way up to the neck and pulls on the new trousers.

“Are you allowed to just… invite me?” 

“If I wasn’t, we’d both have been dead the moment you opened the door.” She glances over again, notes the look on his face. “Oh, calm down. We aren’t, are we?”

John checks for ammunition in the gun before tucking it into the back of his trousers. “So? Where are we going?”

“With any luck, we’re not getting out of this car.”

John knows better than to respond with incredulity, but he really hopes that he’s not going to be shooting bullets through any windshields. A shoot-out in the middle of a car chase is a bit _too_ action movie for his taste. 

“With any luck, we won’t be shooting, either, so stop thinking, it’s annoying.” 

John almost laughs, but he stops himself, and he focuses on the path they’re taking so as to keep himself from becoming too sentimental. 

They ride in companionable silence for a while, winding further and further out of London until the city is very nearly nothing more than a skyline. John likes this part of going out of jobs with Moran: it’s easy companionship; there isn’t a burning need to fill the silence as if to prove that they like each other, that they get along. Getting along with Moran isn’t even, strictly speaking, a priority, but John is glad that he does all the same.

“The target today’s name is Alam,” she says, and she slides a familiar manila envelope out from between her seat. John opens it, flips through the pictures and newspaper clippings. “Low profile to you, high profile to world politics. In other words, important to a bunch of self-important assholes, and supposedly in charge of selling secrets for us.” 

John pauses, still squinting down at the briefing. “But?” 

“If our other sources are to be believed, he’s not doing the best of jobs.”

“Ah.” 

John waits, but Moran doesn’t say anything more. They’re been driving along on a relatively deserted road at rather fast speeds, and John looks out his window. The road slopes upwards, has started to introduce some sharp curves, and guardrails line it about fifty meters ahead. As they round the next curve, they have to slow down dramatically to accommodate for a silver Mercedes driving in front of them. 

“So… we’re going to kill him… without shooting him… from this car.” 

Moran turns to him with a look of disgust at his own ineptitude. 

“Sorry, it just… doesn’t seem feasible.” 

“I might be a sniper, John, but I’m also an assassin,” she says, and her index finger lifts off the wheel to point vaguely at the car ahead of them. “So are you, actually. Don’t underestimate the profession.” 

John scratches uncertainly at his eyebrow. Moran nearly snorts her frustration and gestures emphatically in front of her. 

“That Mercedes ahead of us contains none other than Aasif Alam, completely alone, blood alcohol content of about .3, if everything’s gone according to plan. 

“We don’t want police getting involved in things they don’t need to, especially where Alam is concerned. Not everything has to be messy.” Moran revs the engine of the car and gets as close to Alam as she possibly can without colliding. “Imagine. They might start to catch on.” John’s left hand unconsciously curls around his seat, as if to prepare for impact. Save that, it’s perfectly steady. 

Alam has begun to speed up, is car wavering back and forth between the lines, as if he has somehow sensed that he has reason to be nervous. But Moran holds. They are now so close to the back of Alam’s car that John cannot see the license plate. Moran then feints the van slightly to the right, fiddling with the wheel, and John turns to see her face as she dissolves into the mechanical methodology that John is so familiar with. 

It happens, believe it or not, at a snail’s pace – like watching a bomb go off in Afghanistan, John processes the world so quickly and in such high detail that every click and whir of action moves quiet and slow, as if through water. 

Moran throws on her high beams, bathing the Mercedes and the road in pseudo-daylight, and John brings his arm up in front of his eyes to shield himself from the light reflecting off the back of Alam’s car. Moran then switches gears, floors the accelerator, and brushes the front corner of their van into the back left wheel of the Mercedes.

The brief loss of control is all Alam needs. Overcompensating for the unsteadiness under the influence of alcohol, already driving at easily double the speed limit, Alam swerves off the road, over the guardrail, and sends himself flipping down into the gulch. The twirling headlights flash bizarre patterns through the trees until breaking, and that’s the last thing John notices before everything speeds back up.

Moran skids the car to a stop with a wailing that would be conspicuous if the car crash wasn’t so cacophonous already, the sound of breaking metal, blaring horn and a failing engine crashing through the trees as the car settles at the bottom of the gulch. Pulling the emergency brake and turning off the car lights completely, Moran stops the car in the middle of the road and jumps out. John follows.

They’re halfway down the gulch when the second car arrives, and John has half a moment to be scared before he sees that they’re dressed in black and hurrying down after them towards the wreckage. The car is a mess. They pass a torn-off wheel, Moran snaps at John to be sure not to touch anything. As if he’d be so thick as to do otherwise.

Upon reaching the car, Moran halts John with a hand to his chest and circles it, inspecting the damage. The men from the other car rush past him, saying nothing. Over the car, John sees Moran point at the shattered passenger window and thinks he hears her murmuring orders for one of the men to go in.

When Moran returns to John’s side, she takes gloves from her pocket and taps at the fuel door. John watches as she slowly pries it open, the only sound now being the slight popping of the hot engine and the cracking of fresh-broken branches, just killed.

Moran shrugs off her jacket and shoves it into John’s chest to hold. He takes it, and watches as Moran sheds her shirt and unscrews the gas cap. None of the other men look. One squirms into the back of the car through a shattered window. Alam groans.

John’s attention snaps away from Moran stuffing her tank top into the gas tank, her prominent collarbones, her pale stomach. Until this moment, he hadn’t even noticed that Alam was still alive.

It’s a bad crash, the car seeming to have flipped multiple times more on its journey down into the gulch. Alam’s legs seem to have collided right with the steering wheel and the dashboard has nearly cleaved him in half. Blood covers everything. Alam moans.

A terrible accident. That’s how it will be seen, that’s the only real explanation. John’s breath catches, just for a moment, in his chest.

“Please.” Alam’s eyes are squeezed shut, and he’s barely managing to squeeze out the words through swollen lips. “Please— please, I— _please—”_

“Please _what?_ I can’t—”

“What the fuck are you doing?” John shuts up. His posture snaps back into parade rest without him even being aware of it. “He’s—are you out of your _mind?”_

“Yeah, sorry. Yeah.” John pinches the bridge of his nose and looks away. He focuses instead on how the inside of Moran’s leather jacket is still warm.

Alam continues his one word supplication. John does not turn around. He tightens his hands and closes his eyes and waits for further orders, his pulse pounding deliciously loud.

“I think we’re going to have to set this thing on fire.” Moran rests her boot on a busted tire. “It could take hours for him to bleed out.”

Alam groans again. John thinks he might be crying. John wants to turn around but he can’t, he _can’t._

“They’ll be able to tell it wasn’t a car accident if there’s a fire.” John’s uncertain, he looks at no one as he says his, he readjusts his hold on Moran’s jacket. “I just, I mean, they’ll—”

“ _Jesus,_ John, whose side are you on? If you care so much, get in the car with him and _really_ fuck up the crime scene.” 

John’s ears go pink with shame and humiliation. He doesn’t know why – all the other men don’t even look up, and when Moran dismisses them to go wait by the van while she starts the fire, she tells John to stay back with her. 

“We were supposed to have an entire other van full of personnel,” she says, taking out her lighter. Alam’s groans grow loud again when he sees the flame, but Moran only lights her cigarette, “and two other commanding officers. Medical guys, you know? Who can fake vehicular homicide if it doesn’t go as planned. They were coming in from Belize, but they were supposed to be here _hours_ ago.” Puffing on her cigarette, she drops the lighter down to light the makeshift fuse she’s made out of her discarded t-shirt. John hands the jacket back to her; she shrugs it on with a small nod in his direction. 

“Maybe they got lost.” 

Moran rolls her eyes at him, and they both set off at a light jog to get up the hill and away from the car before the explosion happens. “My men don’t get _lost.”_ She sighs, releasing a long trail of smoke as she does so. John tries his best to restrain himself from appreciatively inhaling the scent. “Don’t worry about it,” she says as they reach the road, “it’s not your concern.” 

At that, the car blows. The force of the blast, even from a relative distance, sends John staggering forward several feet until finally he lands face forward on the pavement. Even from down in the gulch, the entire road is now awash with a faint orange light, making everyone, even the white vans and the men dressed in black, the dark side of the gulch, Moran with her fire-studded cigarette and rough corners, seem strangely beautiful. 

Looking down at John on the pavement, Moran taps ash away from her fag and then holds out her hand.

*

“Did you ever find out?” he asks several weeks later, when they’re out again together on a hit. He can’t tell if it’s because he still needs to be trained or if Moran has grown fond of him. “About those men coming from Belize, you know.” 

Her reaction is completely unexpected. She grabs him by the hair and pushes his head against the bin they’re staking out behind and stabs her lit cigarette into his arm. “You forget that ever happened, alright?” She hauls him back and pushes him into it again, John’s only wild thought is _she’s going to give away our position._ “I never told you that. Erase that from your memory. Alright? _Alright?”_  

She lets him go, and John’s hand goes immediately to his head. He can feel the bump already forming, and when he takes his hand away, his palm is warm and sticky with blood. “Consider it forgotten.” 

“It better be.”

*

He loses 15,000 pounds next time he’s out gambling, and the more he tries to win it back, the more he loses.

*

He gets beat up by a bookie. He promises he’ll have the money after he finishes his next job, and when the brute sarcastically asks when that may be, John dives for his desk and pulls out his new Smith and Wesson.

“I believe that’s my business, mate, not yours.”

Who he is and who he works for begins to get out, after that. Just leaking at the cracks, a chain of unsaid names spilling over the edge of the dam. When John’s black eye begins to fade, he actually feels slightly disappointed.

*

He and Moran don’t talk much when they go out together on jobs, which suits John just fine. They sit and they wait for the mark, occasionally debating the benefits of Remington vs. Mossberg. He has more in common with Moran than anyone he’s ever met, and he is slightly too pleased by the idea that she may feel the same way. Perhaps it’s a symptom of being in the army, but along with the rush of being in charge and giving orders, John has always had an eager, addictive inclination towards approval.

“Why’d you start doing this?” she asks one afternoon. They’ve got their bellies pressed against the floor of a stifling attic. 

“No idea,” John says, and it’s true. He supposes he could figure it out, chase a tall man in a coat down mazes of logic he is tentative to pursue, but he is afraid of what he will find at the conclusion. “I suppose I was bored.” He adjusts his gun, waits for the mark to get up from the desk and walk to the window. “You?” 

“The same.” Moran pulls her sleeve back and glances at her watch. She sighs. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

They haven’t said it, but they both understand, somehow.

*

In his dream, he climbs 200 flights of stairs to enter Moran’s flat. There’s a tiger skin stretched out on the bed, and it takes a moment for John to register that Moran’s wearing it. Her head flickers out between the teeth. 

“Jim wanted her turned into a _carpet,”_ she says, stroking the fur, and when she stands she is taller than John thought she was and she looks a lot like Sherlock. “I thought a robe was much more fitting. Don’t you agree?” 

John wants to wear it. John wants to cross the room and slip Sherlock on, if only he can feel his heart racing like it used to.

*

In Germany, John gets sloppy. It’s his own fault – after tailing his target for eight days, he gets impatient. Some idiot slit a knife into him in the basement of a bar over a game of cards, and John had lost his golden opportunity by spending it pouring alcohol over the wound in a dingy hotel room and sewing himself shut with a stolen first aid kit. 

He’s been spending more money on alcohol than food (beer in the bloodstream does more for pain than a full stomach does, and he is Germany, after all), and at this point, he’s sick of waiting. Schmidt has a horribly annoying habit of keeping someone with him wherever he goes, constantly looking over his shoulder. So on the evening of the eighth day, John climbs onto the back of a moving truck and decides to take his shot from there. 

Schmidt’s on the move as well, in the car directly ahead, and John fires when they both come to a halt at a stoplight. 

He misses. 

He fires again, and this time, his aim is true – Schmidt slumps over his steering wheel and forces the horn to blare out further signal of the fact that he’s been recently murdered. 

Jumping off the roof of the truck, John’s bad leg buckles upon landing. He can feel his stitches strain, pull open on the right side. He can’t stop swearing as he drags his body across the street, pushing with his good leg, rifle making a racket as the metal bounces its way across the pavement by his side. It’s doesn’t help that the gun is likely permanently damaged from the jump and impact, something John could have avoided if his fucking leg hadn’t given way, but he needs to carry the dead weight because it’s not like he can just leave his gun at the crime scene.

The men in the truck are watching him, the one in the passenger seat already out to examine Schmidt’s body, the other just staring out at him through the window. He’s got blonde hair and a soft, round face. They’re both just delivery men. John realizes that he can’t let either of them get away. 

He’s taken to keeping his Browning in a holster in case of emergencies, and he’s almost faint with relief that he bothered to take it to Germany. Pushing himself finally onto the sidewalk, he aims for the man looking into Schmidt’s car and shoots.

The other man catches on fairly quickly, but he’s not going to be fast enough. John has half a moment to hate himself, to look inward with pure revulsion as he registers the fear on the driver’s face, before everything goes mechanical and he takes aim. 

Blood from the pulled apart stitches is soaking towards his shirt. He sneers. That’s the second one he’s ruined.

*

Someone else may have seen him. He took his shot in the street on the outskirts of the city, far from the middle of nowhere, he knowingly did it right in front of two witnesses. He thinks he may have seen someone whipping around the corner at the end of the street, but it could just be him imagining. Hopes he was just.

*

He sits and waits for the pain in his leg to subside. He hates it, having to stick around the three dead bodies, but there’s not much to be done when you can’t bloody move.

*

The moment he’s back on English soil, his entire spine is coiled with the tension of awaiting his punishment. He considers seeing a doctor, but he doesn’t want to call more attention to himself than he already has, and he doesn’t think that the gash is something he can’t manage. 

By the end of the second day, John thinks that perhaps he’s managed to get himself off easy. The torn-open stab wound, perhaps, was punishment enough.

That is when, of course, Moran shows up at his door and beats the living hell out of him.

 It could be worse: she slaps him twice across the face in a way that will not bruise; when she wrestles him to the ground, she does so tenderly in a fashion that is aware of his stitches. She pins John’s wrists behind his back and she holds him there, pressed into the carpet, until he stops struggling. Moran leans down further to whisper into John’s ear.

“I’m supposed to kick you right in your stitches,” she says, and John’s whole body aches for something that is not pain. He can feel himself tilting his head closer to the warmth of her breath. “I’m tempted. But I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”

She releases his hands, and a stray index finger drags feather-light across his wrist. John’s breath shudders, and he doesn’t even try to get up.

Whispering, he says: “I won’t tell.”

*

He walks into a tattoo parlor situated down a back alley – the place smells like smoke and ink and more like Sherlock than it should; blood and drugs but without his crispness. Tea used to remind him of Sherlock, he remembers, but he knows now that the very notion of it is painfully sentimental.

The parlor has the oddly quiet air of a party whose music has just been turned off. With the way everyone is looking at him, John realises that perhaps it has been. People with mohawks and studded collars are eyeing him like something they are wary to look at.

John feels sickeningly prideful when he puts two and two together and figures out that they’re scared.

He does not have to wait for the parlor’s best artist. He sits down backwards, legs straddling the chair back, and he shrugs off his jacket and peels off his vest. He points at his right tricep. 

“A tiger.”

He draws his index finger in a curving line to his mid-forearm. “The tail ends here.” 

The artist nods. For the next several hours the parlor is dead silent, save hush of people leaving and the buzz of the needle.

*

His name is Ronald Alexander Adair, and he’s going to help John win his money back and then triple it into fortune.

He’s Ron to his friends, Mr. Adair to everyone else, more than half John’s age and the best damn poker partner he’s had in years. There’s a rumour about that he’s somehow part of the landed gentry, but all John really cares about is his uncanny talent of bluffing and his ability to help him win pot after pot.

*

When Moran speaks of India, she does so with a dazed expression of nostalgia that John never would have expected her to wear. She tells details instead of stories, expounds upon colours and sounds, wildlife and street vendors, car chases on dirt roads with shitty radio and _tigers,_ you should have seen the tigers, I’d give anything to go back, I really would.

John thinks her love for it is lovely.

“That’s where I got properly good at shooting, you know. I mean, I’ve been practising since I was little, but in India – I was there twice, you know, once before and once—”

Moran cuts herself off, and then settles back in to searching for the target as if her sudden stop at the end isn’t painfully noticeable.

 “You know, I feel like I might have heard rumors. While I was in Afghanistan.” 

“That’s fucking astonishing, John. Please God, tell me more.”

“A sniper? Named Moran? Some sort of genetically altered super-killer. Never missed a shot, no matter the range.” 

Moran doesn’t turn away from her gun. 

“You’re lying.” 

John leans in, almost playful in the way that he pokes her side. “Is that a confirmation? Am I right? That was the name?” 

Her posture is slouched and rounded, her rebellion against the military coming off of her in waves. She pushes him away, hand so firm against his chest that it surprises him. When John studies her face more carefully, he sees that she’s literally glaring into the scope.

 “Moran, I—”

She says: “I’m not genetically altered.”

She shoots both targets. John hasn’t even bothered to turn back to his gun. 

She begins to disassemble her rifle. When she finishes, she slings the bag casually over her shoulder and she does not look at John. 

She says: “I’ve never been to Afghanistan.”

*

She doesn’t say anything about it until they’re both drinking in John’s hotel room, well past midnight. They’d started the evening swapping stories about their exes. John had told three about Sherlock, using a woman’s name, only slipping up twice when he got too caught up in himself. If Moran noticed, she hadn’t said. 

But conversation had moved beyond that and slid into the post-evening quiet, and Moran clenches her fists and exhales like she’s steeling herself to say something. 

“That was me. In Afghanistan. Obviously.” 

It’s quiet again. Moran reaches forward and unscrews the cap from the liquor. 

“I wasn’t respected,” she says as she pours herself more whiskey, “couldn’t move up in the ranks at all, I was ready to kill the lot of them. Almost did, actually. On multiple occasions.” She smiles at this, almost grim, and John cannot tell if she’s trying to be funny or just smiling at the memory of the potential of death. She throws her entire drink back at once. “I was totally exiled in my squad. A few people – they stood up for me. They said everyone was just… just jealous. That I shouldn’t listen to them, it didn’t matter. If I didn’t pay them any attention, they would… they would leave me alone.”

John nods carefully along. 

“One night, they—” Moran trails off, jaw setting, staring at a fault in the wood of the table. She swallows. John wants to reach across and touch her hand. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” 

“It’s alright.” 

“Jim fixed that for me.” She squeezes her eyes shut. She breathes. “In fact,” she says, looking up to meet John’s eyes and smiling, teeth glinting inside of her mouth like wasps, “he fixed the whole platoon.” 

“And you… left,” John says, eyes focused on the dregs of rum and coke left in his glass, feeling like a misplaced bullet in the wrong gun. “After that.” 

Moran raises her eyebrows, affixing him with the familiar look of exasperated disbelief that fills John with comfort. 

“Obviously.”

*

Sometimes, when Adair is busy, Moran comes out and plays cards with him. She’s shit at it, so they play for low stakes, and as much as this annoys John, he acknowledges that it’s probably a useful exercise. He also practises hiding cards up his sleeve on these outings, measuring probabilities and gaining the trust of the table. Moran doesn’t notice. No one notices. Just once, of course, because there is always a just once – just once, someone does, a woman across the lounge. Their eyes meet. John swallows, licks his lips, feels the deliciously vile thrill of anticipation – but she does nothing. She smiles at him. She turns away. Moran, seeing the exchange play out on John’s face, leans forward and cocks her head in curiosity. 

John shakes his head to alleviate her of any anxiety, but they leave ten minutes later all the same. Walking down the middle of the street, they do not say anything, but Moran does stick a cigarette between John’s lips and lights it by pressing it up against the burning end of her own. John likes that. He doesn’t say so. 

He gets the feeling that he and Moran are each other’s’ only friends.

*

John likes completing hits abroad, even though he understands that it feels a bit unorthodox. Where once he felt like he was always met by a swarm of colleagues, unsteady men carrying ‘M’ business cards or pulling off their first job with John at the helm, he feels less like part of a network and more like a spare bolt gone astray. He still knows what he needs to do, of course, and gets the sense that the more work he does, the more integral he is to his organization, but he’s starting to wonder where everyone else is, or if they’re gone altogether.

*

He dreams of stopping things with guns, like he used to. Stopping death with death, as opposed to his current situation. He dreams about shooting lions and shooting civilians and shooting a man as he falls from a building to keep him from hitting the ground. He keeps Sherlock in the air beside St Bart’s with bullets, riddling his body with holes with a force that twirls his limp body around like some sort of perverse circus act. He shoots until the skin is gone, until the blood is falling on him like it’s raining. Only then does he see what he’s done, and he lets the body drop so he can pull him apart and open his head and look at his brain, which is striped, like a tiger.

He wakes up to the sound of gunshots, and it’s only then that he realise that he’s put two holes in the wall. He has thirty seconds before the landlord barges in and starts yelling at him, unless he’s a heavy sleeper, in which case he has until morning. (Judging, however, by the bags under his eyes and the crow’s feet around them, the man isn’t a heavy sleeper and never was. Twenty seconds. Those are his feet on the stairs.)

His new flat has lasted him three days. He’s out of bed and made it in five seconds flat – army habit – and all he has to do is shove the Browning into his still-packed duffle and grab a few non-necessities from the living room (this was how, three months ago, he lost Sherlock’s scarf – thrown over the back of a sofa and left behind, bloodstained from the fall and his last job. He doesn’t notice for several months. He doesn’t bother to regret it. Ten seconds. He’s beating on the door.)

John doesn’t mind moving around. He hoists open the window and hopes, with a wry smirk, that the landlord won’t mind he hasn’t yet put a down payment on the rent.

He calls the first person he can think of. 

“Jesus fucking Christ at a bullfight, you better not tell me you’ve been kicked out of your flat.”

“Come on, just let me kip on your sofa, you won’t even know I’m there.”

Silence on the other end of the line. Then—

“ _Fine._ ” 

“I owe you one.” 

“More like twenty. And if you start yelling in your sleep because you’re having nightmares, I promise you you’re going to wake up with a pen through your throat.”

John laughs. If he tried, he wouldn’t be able to remember when he started thinking threats were funny. “Understood.”

*

When John arrives on her doorstep, Moran is careful and small and she does not step away from the threshold. She’s in her pajamas – John’s never seen her in pajamas before. She’s wearing an A-shirt, and oversized blue-and-white striped bottoms. Her hair is askew. Like a bear without fur.

Her eyes are half-closed and John’s hand tightens around his duffel bag. She reaches her hand to John’s hair and cards her fingertips through the front of it, her warm palm resting on his forehead. John almost lets himself close his eyes. 

“I made up the sofa for you.” 

“You didn’t have to do that.” 

“I did.”

John’s lips quirk upward.

“And you’re not sleeping anywhere near your gun. You aren’t shooting _my_ walls up in the middle of the night.”

“Okay,” John says. 

“Good,” she says. 

“Okay.” 

And then Moran leans forward and kisses him. 

It’s a short kiss – small and chaste, her fingers curling against the start of John’s sideburns on one side. John doesn’t respond, but he smiles against her lips. “That’s not why I came.”

“It’s why I invited you.” She pulls away, smiles a little. She finally steps out of the way of the door. John wishes he could get a good look around at the flat, see what it looks like – it, at the very least, looks much more lived in than anywhere John has briefly squatted over the course of the past year and a half – but it’s too dark. He supposes he’ll get a good look in the morning. 

“You’re lying.” 

“You’re right,” she says. “I just felt bad because you’re such a pathetic little tit.”

“That’s what I thought.” 

He falls asleep on Moran’s soft sofa, listening to the vague sounds of her moving about the flat and going back to bed. The pillow that she’s given him smells like cigarettes. It’s nice.

*

On his third morning waking up in Moran’s flat, he blearily opens one eye and sees that she is still there. 

This is an anomaly: the previous two days, John had only seen her at the slam of the door, or when she climbed in through her window in the evenings. But now she sits at a laptop in her kitchen, holding a piece of toast between her teeth and talking hurriedly into her phone. 

It goes on for quite a while, Moran typing frantically and holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, speaking rapidly in jargon John just barely recognizes. He doesn’t mind, much, the buzz of a voice is a nice thing to wake up to, even though she’s clearly filled with tension. 

Every once in a while, when the typing and speaking ceases and she’s just reading her computer screen with forced concentration, her hand will stray up into her hair and tug lightly at it. It’s rather endearing. John also likes that she’s in combat boots and khaki trousers, paired with nothing else but a black sports bra. It seems fitting, for her. She’s worryingly thin. Then again, she has more muscles than John does.

When she hangs up, the flat goes quiet, tension easing its way out the windows. John watches as her shoulders unfurl.

“What was that all about?”

Moran turns to look in John’s direction, managing to look nonplussed for about four seconds before suppressing it. “New horse statistics.” Before John can open his mouth, she cuts him off—“oh, shut up, you’re the last person in the world to lecture me about a gambling problem.”

John smiles and shrugs. Moran’s attention stays glued to him like he’s a puzzle with a piece missing. “I was just going to ask which horse you were betting on.”

“Oh,” Moran says. She turns back to her laptop, and John thinks that’s the end of it. And then—“Dover. Definitely Dover.”

*

In spite of everything, John still wants to kill Jim Moriarty. Wrap his hands around his throat and have the name “Richard Brook” poisoning his ears through his final moments. When he kills people now, he’s in it for the chase. He doesn’t think about the act so much, just as he’d done in the army. But Moriarty – he wants to watch the light leave his eyes.

But then: there’s more to this than John wants to admit.

It’s a matter of self-preservation, in the end.

*

After a week of kipping on the sofa, John goes back to squatting. He’s not completely keen on the idea, but extending his stay from one night to six seems to be overstepping the line enough already. He spends a night sleeping at the Vauxhall Arches, and then finds an abandoned flat whose only other inhabitant seems to be a particularly mangy cat. John shares his crackers with her, when he’s inclined to. It’s a pleasantly symbiotic relationship.

His next assignment is given to him when he’s bumped into at Tesco. A fluster of limbs, a quick curse from John, and then the stranger is gone and there is a manila envelope sitting in his trolley. He stuffs it into his jacket, waits until after he’s returned to the flat to open it up.

He’s to take out five targets. It’s the largest assignment he’s ever been given, which, he supposes, is why he’ll be partnered up with Moran.

When he meets her, jumping into a black car that parks itself two streets away from his flat, there is absolutely nothing different about Moran’s demeanor except for the way her feet are planted and a slight tension in the way that she moves her arms. John’s surprised that he picks up on it. Moran glances over at him, cigarette poking out of her mouth. She’s polishing her Sig. It’s a nicer gun than John’s Browning. 

“It was fucking tedious,” she says, jostling the cigarette around in her mouth as she speaks, “having to come all the way over here to pick you up.” 

John shrugs. He’s not sure what he’s done – perhaps she’s just in a bad mood. “Sorry.” 

“I just—I mean—” And now something must definitely be wrong, because Moran never stumbles like that, is never trying to rush after herself to figure her words out. She looks anywhere but John, glancing out the window and focusing with rigid determination on her revolver. “I could use some help with the rent. If you wanted.”

John smiles.

*

He doesn’t even move in, strictly speaking. He brings his duffel bag back to her flat and drops it at the foot of the sofa, still made up like a bed from the last time he slept there. He likes the fact that his belongings can be carried around over his shoulder, and if need be he could drop it at a moment’s notice and be none the poorer for it. It makes him feel less tied to the Earth, like he has less to lose. He’s learned, now. 

“Chinese?” she says. She’s already holding the carton of lo mein, and is eating directly out of it, but she holds it out to John as if expecting him to take it. 

“Starving.”

*

One evening, waiting for a mark by a bus station, planning to shoot him at close range and make a break for it, John feels something irritating his wrist. He tries adjusting his shirt, but that doesn’t do anything, so in the end, he pulls back his sleeve and finds that he still has an ace there.

He looks at it and laughs, turning it over in his fingers. It must have been there all day without him noticing.

When it comes time to take out the target, John throws the ace into the air before he takes his shot. Both he and Walker watch as it flutters in a small parabola and starts to make its way back down. 

When it crosses in front of Walker’s line of vision, John pulls his gun and shoots. 

He picks the card up off the ground before blood can get on it. He’s put a hole straight through the center.

*

“It’s an assassin,” she says very quietly. John looks up from his book and cocks his head to the side. “My men from Belize.” 

Brow immediately furrowing, John licks his lips. “A hit man for hit men?” 

Moran almost laughs. “Something like that.”

*

And yet, John’s worries that his own form of livelihood and reason for living are about to be liquidated are alleviated when Moran informs him that they’ve both been invited to the grand opening of an art exhibit. When he asks how they have anything to do with the museum’s new Renoir, Moran turns to him with a smirk on her face that John hasn’t seen since they first started working together. 

“It’s a front, John. Doesn’t every company have a drinks thing once a year where the employees get together?” 

John nods like he understands, but he doubts that this will be anything like the ‘drinks thing’s that he’s been to in the past. He asks around about it, speaking very sparsely to the few people he trusts, and tends to be met with utter confusion, or people who know just as little as he does. 

Adair, of all people, knows something. It’s the first time John has ever heard the name associated with himself like this, and he can’t help but bring it up on the night of the opening. He’d arrived back from the flat to the sight of a tuxedo draped over his sofa, Moran in the shower. He knocks on the door, as was their protocol, and Moran shouts a confirmation that it’s her over the sound of rushing water. They’d decided upon this system after Moran had told a story about disguising a murder with the sound of the shower. 

John changes into his tuxedo and walks into Moran’s room to utilize her full length mirror. He looks quite smart in it, though he has to look up on the internet how to tie his bow tie. Before he can get the hang of it, Moran walks in draped in a towel and rolls her eyes. “Just let me do it for you, you git.” 

John raises his chin and he lets her. The knuckles of her fingers brush lightly against his neck. 

Turning back to his reflection as soon as she’s done, John brushes dust that isn’t there off of his shoulders and tugs at the bottom of the jacket to keep it from looking wrinkled. Moran gets half-dressed and settles herself on the bed, squeezing out her hair. 

“Ron said something about our boss being there, is that true? That’ll be a sight.” John ignores the fact that his left hand twitches as he speaks. 

Moran looks at him with narrowed eyes and a half-smile, as if she’s not sure if she should be laughing or not. “Have you really not figured out who you’re working for yet?”

“I’m smarter than you think I am, you know.” 

Moran’s lips unfurl into a smile. “Cuter, too. You look nice in that suit.” She slides herself off the bed, crawling, catlike, over her own limbs. She crosses the room to stand behind John’s back, watching his face in the full-length mirror. “You don’t have a killer’s face.”

“It works in my favour.” 

There’s a pause before Moran responds, and when she does, it is with a sincerity that John has only heard come out of her mouth one or twice. “Aren’t you scared?”

John smooths down the lapels of his jacket and smiles at their reflections. “I like being scared,” he says, measuring his words as he says them. “Reminds me I’m alive. That I want to _stay_ alive.”

“But working for Jim—” 

John turns, not bothering to mind Moran at all, bullying her with his shoulders. She slinks back, eyeing him like a petulant cat. “I’m not working for anyone other than myself,” he snaps, the lie more for his benefit than hers.

*

The art gallery is decadent, much more decadent than John would expect for a gathering of professional killers, and the party would be indistinguishable from a fine gala if not for the two dozen German Shepherds lining the walls with armed guards as if expecting some sort of terrorist attack at any moment. Considering the company, actually, John thinks that this might not be entirely far-fetched.

Moran is wearing a black backless dress, sipping champagne. When John turns to her, he pretends that he is not looking for Moriarty.

“You want to say something,” he says.

“It’s classified.” 

John smiles, leans over daringly to talk in her ear, “yes, but I can keep a secret, I promise.” 

“Not this one.” 

John straightens back up. He puts another expression of grave seriousness on, but he can’t quite manage to keep it. “Has it got something to do with our hit man?” 

There’s a small pause before Moran decides to respond. She hums and nods, then take a small sip from her champagne. “Maybe.” Another beat. Moran turns around so she and John are shoulder to shoulder, facing opposite directions, and John glances down at the smooth expanse of skin that’s her back. The dress is feminine, but extremely fitting to her personality, a perfect combination of short and lace and dangerous. “There’s too few people here.” 

“Perhaps there’s another party going on,” John quips. “Somewhere where the champagne’s not utter shite.” 

When Moran turns to him, she’s surprised, she’s beaming, and she’s so happy that John’s afraid something’s gone terribly wrong. She takes him by his upper arms. “Would you like to dance?” 

John’s agreeing with a disbelieving smile before he knows what he’s doing, and Moran, in her typical unorthodox fashion, is leading them through a sweeping waltz. Not many couples are bothering with dancing, and the women are outnumbered to men by at least five to one, besides.

John causes them to stumble when his phone buzzes with a text. Still dancing, he lets go of Moran’s waist and pulls his mobile from his pocket. 

                                _Man in office 204 needs neutralizing._

When Moran sighs, it almost sounds exasperated. 

“Don’t tell me that’s a hit.” 

“What, do you do this a lot?” John missteps, and Moran squeezes his hand harder in reprimand. John chuckles a bit, because Moran is the last person he’d expect to be a stickler about dancing, and slips his phone back into his pocket. “Dress yourself up, seduce the targets, kill them at their most vulnerable… like a Bond girl?” 

Their dancing stutters again. Moran’s mouth immediately twists into an offended scowl. “I’ve never slept with someone to complete a hit in _my life.”_

John swallows; nods quickly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—It’s my mistake.” 

They’re silent for a moment. Dancing. 

His phone buzzes again. John takes this as his cue to go, and Moran lets him, taking up with a new partner without missing a single step. John wades through the crowd, climbs the stairs, and waits until he’s just outside the office door to read his newest message.

                                  _Kill this one with a pen._

_xx_ _Jim_

  _He’s here,_ is all John can think, his pulse in his throat. _He’s here, he’s here._

 But there’s nothing he can do. He can only step forward and open the door.

 “Evening,” the man says when John enters. “Is there something I can do for you?”

John dearly wishes that he’d brought his gun. Then again, if he had, he’d probably already be half eaten alive by enormous police dogs, so perhaps not.

There is a ball point pen on the desk in the center of the room. The man, standing by the window, would barely know what hit him if John drove it into his skull. Through the temple, he thinks. Or get the man bent over, he would push it upwards through the nape of his neck, he would—

John wants to be sick, just thinking about it.

He removes his bow tie. 

“Yeah, I was actually just looking for the loo,” he says, and he tests the strength of the material by tugging at it slightly. 

“What are you—” But then John jumps. 

The fight isn’t the most difficult one of his life. Despite the fact that the man – whose office door says ‘Mr Weston’, but John can have no idea if the man actually belongs to this room or not – is two heads taller than him, he’s significantly weaker and easily wrestled into a choke hold. 

John’s nearly thrown off his back twice, and at the last moment the man nearly turns around to lay a blow on him, but by then, John has pulled his tie around the man’s neck. He walks him backwards, towards the wall of the office, his own face going red with the effort as the man below him starts to lose the strength in his legs and slump downwards. He’s spluttering. He’s looking up at John in utter confusion and fear.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the man’s face turning purple, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, if I had a gun, I’d—” 

The man’s eyes close and all the fight goes out of him. John holds the tie in place for several more moments before straightening and doing a poor job of re-tying it himself. It’s stretched quite considerably, from his pulling on it.

He hasn’t taken half a step out of the room when he is immediately tackled by a tall man in a red suit, pushing him by his weak shoulder straight into the hallway wall. 

“Hello, John,” he hisses, and he’s so overjoyed with himself that he can’t seem to manage to stop laughing. As if for effect, he pulls John’s tired body away from the wall and pushes him back again, so John hits his head and his knees double. “Remember me?” 

John, jaw clenched, just watches him. He’s never seen this man before in his life. 

“Jim? Jim Moriarty?” and then he pins John’s hands about his head and pulls a pocket knife from his pocket, and John squirms and jerks, trying to get out of the grasp of the man’s firm, large hands and failing. “Come on now. I used to frequent your old Laundromat.” He raises his knife and digs it into the skin of John’s palm, and John can’t stop himself from crying out before he muffles it. Jim lets his hands go, but he keeps John firmly pinned by holding his neck in place. 

“You’re not Moriarty,” John manages to say through gritted teeth, shoulders digging into the wall. Blood from his palm trickles down the length of his middle finger. “I know Moriarty. He looks nothing like you.”

This is not entirely untrue. The man does not look like Moriarty: he is tall and tan with a mop of curly hair that he’s slicked back with grease and an accent straight out of South Africa. He shows his teeth much more than Moriarty. And yet – 

He dresses like Moriarty. His cadence is high and it is manic and he speaks like he is not sure of his own voice anymore and John still feels like he cannot look him in the eye.

“Very good,” Jim says, nipping John’s ear and licking right below. He grabs John’s punctured hand and pins it to the wall above his head and chuckles as he squirms further backwards. Jim presses further in. “Tell your clever friend that there are simpler ways to live forever.”

John moves to punch him – snap his neck, _something –_ and finds a gun pressed into the soft underside of his jaw, Jim’s knee pinned between his legs.

“Now, now,” Jim says, “don’t be rash.” He runs the gun up and down John’s throat, twirls it lazily around his Adam’s apple. When he swallows, he feels it bob against the barrel. He closes his eyes. 

“Very good,” Jim coos, and he smiles. He takes his gun and he runs it teasingly along the lines of John’s cheekbones. “Now,” he says, with the air of a patient schoolteacher vibrating with something much more sinister beneath, “why didn’t you do as I asked, Doctor Watson?” 

“I did your bloody job.” This, however, is the wrong thing to say, as Jim slides closer, his knee slotted precise and close between John’s thighs. John wants to gasp but he can’t move; a tic in his upper lip twitches. He stares back at Moriarty, eyes boring into pupils like black pits: it is the only place to look without baring his neck or deferring downwards. Moriarty’s newest smirk is full of malice. 

“No, you only did it fifty percent of the way. And if you remember primary school at all, Johnny,” – he drags the gun down the side of John’s face, dips it into his shoulder wound, and then up and down John’s side, slipping it beneath the suit jacket – “you’ll know that 50% is still failing.” 

“For God’s sake, I got the mark, maybe I just didn’t _read_ your bloody text, I’m not—I’m not _murderous—”_

And somehow he’s done something right, because Jim steps back to contemplate him. In a cartoonish caricature, he taps the barrel of the gun against his chin like an enormous, perverse index finger. It’s almost more unnerving, not being pinned, because John does not want to move away from the wall and he no longer knows what to do with his hands.

“But you are a murderer,” he says, almost musing. “Fancy that.”

He backs off further and sticks his hands in his pockets. He seems to enjoy watching John’s discomfort, watching as he slumps slightly down the wall and holds his hand palm upwards, putting pressure against the cut, trying to stop the bleeding. 

“Enjoy the rest of the party,” he says, and he’s gone.

*

Moran finds him bandaging his hand back at their flat using the first aid kit from under the sink. She doesn’t say anything, but when she sits down and helps with the wrappings, John knows that she knows. 

“You’re a good man, aren’t you, Doctor Watson?” John is not even surprised that she knows his full name, that she knows he is a Doctor. He wonders when Jim told her. “A good man with his heart burnt out.” 

John doesn’t say anything. 

“There were five others,” she says. “Murders. Tonight.”

John looks up at her, brow furrowed. He wants to know who the other ones were. He wants to know if they were inside jobs, and if they weren’t, how it was possible to get past the high security and the German Shepherds.

“At this point, I’m starting to think that we’re all just killing ourselves.”

*

The bandage on his hand makes it harder to cheat at cards. He starts losing.

Adair stops him before any real damage can be done, but he still curses himself and swears heartily every time he changes the dressing.

*

He’s sent to Italy for a hit. He does like to travel, but he wonders if resources are really so spare on the ground that he has to travel all the way from England to take care of just one drug lord. In fact, John hasn’t seen masses of people gathered for a target since the Adamvi murder. And while John knows that he does good work, he’s not conceited enough to think that he’s the only hired gun good enough and trustworthy enough to complete a job.

He pulls his cigarettes from his pocket and lights up on the train, looking around the compartment, daring someone to complain.

No one does.

*

He watches her as she spins the chopsticks delicately between her fingers. It’s a moment of staring at her without looking when he sees it:

“You’re left-handed too?”

Moran smiles. It’s the kind of grin that looks like it’s hiding a laugh, lighting her eyes up, and for the first time since he’s seen her, it strikes John that he finds her pretty. “Took you long enough to notice.”

That night, they settle in together on the couch and John lets Moran show him some of her favorite films. She likes heist movies, Hitchcock. She talks through an old adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story that John wouldn’t have understood even if he’d given it his undivided attention. He likes this; they don’t often spend evenings in.

At one point, John reclines, and Moran follows him. They fall asleep on top of each other, feet pressed up against the arm of the sofa, Moran’s face buried in John’s collarbone. Her left arm drapes over him, her curved fingers just barely grazing the hardwood floor, and John thinks that she actually makes a rather effective blanket. He lets the blue light of the telly illuminate them both for a while, watching the images move on the screen without really watching them, but finally reaches for the remote when he gives the plot up as a lost cause. 

He can’t examine Moran’s face while she’s asleep, as it’s using his neck as a pillow. But he can feel her warm breath against his skin, is occasionally able to register the flutter of her eyelashes. He imagines she looks more innocent and peaceful than it is possible for her to look during the day. The thought is a placating one. He falls asleep quickly, his hand on her back, gently inhaling the soft scent of her hair.

*

She bursts into the flat in a flurry of activity that strikes John as something he recognizes, but has half-forgotten.

“I’m dyeing my hair tonight. Just warning you because I’ve done it before and it makes the flat smell fucking rancid.” It’s the first thing she says upon walking through the door, she’s untying a scarf and dropping it on the floor along with her jacket. The plastic Tesco bag which John assumes contains the hair dye makes a great deal of soft, rustling noise, to the point that John supposes it’s doing so just for the added effect of chaos.

“Why?”

John does not realise that he’s waiting for the agitated “For a _case,_ John!” until he does not get it.

“Got spotted. And there’s no word on the mysterious assassin, which means that they’re still out there, and I’m not taking any chances. I’ve already cut all my hair off, there’s not much else I can do.”

Despite her protestations that she’s done this before, John follows her into the toilet and helps her as she lowers her head into the sink and turns on the taps. John reads the instructions, though Moran shouts and swears with impatience, and slowly massages the color into her scalp. He wears the plastic gloves that came in the box and is sure to cover the entirety of her head, doing his best to avoid the skin so as not to stain it. Her hair’s grown a bit, since he first met her, so he has to be careful to lift it up to be sure he’s getting at all the strands.

John feels almost mermerised as he paints in the dye, as if he’s watching himself from a distance. Hair dye’s always struck him as a bit odd, he supposes, its ability to change a person.

That still doesn’t explain why his stomach feels sick as her white-blonde locks become darker, darker.

*

John will not think about what she looks like because she does not look like him. She is short, and she’s got smaller hands, and breasts, for God’s sake, and crooked teeth. John focuses instead on all of the things he likes about her but never would have known if they hadn’t become close, like the way she chirps when she sneezes or gets the hiccups almost every single time she drinks water, and hates both of these things because she wants to feel intimidating. Whenever she sneezes she scowls like her own body has wronged her, and John thinks that perhaps his diversion is not working at all because he’s known someone else with similar quirks. 

It works for a week before he can’t help himself, because thinking of all the things he likes about her has him more endeared to her than ever, and they’re casually bumping elbows as they do dishes in the sink when John says, “oh, bugger it,” and kisses her. He cups her face with his hands, soapy water and all, and Moran is immediately responsive, running her tongue quickly along John’s lower lip. 

God, his knees almost buckle. He hadn’t been expecting that. He hasn’t been properly kissed in ages. 

And then it feels like an attack, almost, or a battle, but their quiet symbiosis is still there, jumping back and forth between them with gentle pressures. Moran grinds her hips against John’s, bullies him backwards against the sink, and John has to bring one hand down to support himself against the counter. 

“You did this—on purpose,” John says in a hush, right hand going to her hair so he can run it through his fingers, watch it fall back to her skull in gentle, thick curls. God, it curls. 

“I did nothing of the sort,” and her face is so soft against the gentle roughness of the stubble against his mouth, she’s hard as stone but she’s so smooth, like she’s been run over by water for years and years and years and years. “If I’m not mistaken, you’re the one who kissed me.” 

“Mmm,” and that’s all he can say, he’s grabbing and he’s pulling her closer and he’s filled with more want than he’s felt in ages. She slots her hips to his and hooks her legs around his thighs, so John’s holding her, and there’s no pleasanter weight in the world than holding someone you’re kissing. God, all her angles against his. And then he can feel the shape of her Sig press into the small of his back as she reaches around to hold onto him, the line of the barrel teasing him like a promise, and he nearly collapses. 

“You didn’t.” 

“A good assassin always carries her gun,” and John can only whimper.

“Bed,” Moran says with authority, nudging him with her nose. John grunts a ‘yes’, and they go.

Her fingers dart quickly across his clothes, undoing buttons and zips faster than John can keep track of them and Moran rolls her hips against his growing erection before he can even think about attempting to try. He doesn’t think that he’s slept with someone this good at sex since uni, and they haven’t even started.

“Come on,” she says, ripping her own shirt over her head and discarding it onto the floor with the rest of the clothes. John lifts his hips to pull his pants and his trousers down, but as he does so he has to freeze and shudder, the cool metal of Moran’s Sig nudging against his ribs.

_“Fuck.”_

“Hmm,” Moran says, and her voice is hazy to the point where John can hardly hear her. “Do you like this as much as I do?”

She’s done away with the rest of her clothes but John feels immensely more vulnerable, and he strains up towards her to rub himself against her. Moran rocks against him, catching slightly against the cotton of his pants, and drags the gun in a lazy circle around his nipple, pulls it up to nestle against his neck.

“That feels—” John’s breath stutters, the gun’s barrel pressing into the soft flesh of his lower jaw—“good.” The gun dips into his bullet wound, and Moran’s free hand briefly traces the shape of the tiger inked into his other side. John’s desperate with want for _something,_ for _more,_ but Moran seems perfectly content with lazy, she’s smiling and sliding back and forth so minutely that John’s lips tremble against everything he cannot even begin to beg for.

Moran smirks, teeth glinting like a devil through firelight. She grins as she lowers herself further down, pulling John’s trousers off completely and pressing her face into the heat of John’s arousal, running her tongue up the edge of his groin where the pants meet his skin. John can feel his legs spasm as they try to curl inward, he fights the immense urge to buck. Moran moves back upwards, pressing kisses to John’s stomach, tongue dipping into his navel before she lowers her right hand and holds the gun between her thighs. She runs it over John’s clothed erection with a slow and practiced roll of her hips. “Of course it feels good,” she says, and John has to scramble to remember what she’s even responding to. She fucks herself, just a little, against the gun’s grip, and John realises that he doesn’t particularly care.

Moran pulls herself back up John’s body, leaving the gun on the bed as she makes to reach for her nightstand, but John intercepts her, hands wrapping confidently around her ribs so he can hold her close and kiss her, eyes screwed shut. She’s warm and soft; John can taste a hint of salt and the smoke from her last fag. He sucks on her lower lip and she thrusts impatiently against him – John groans, throwing his head back to the bed, and while he reaches up to close his hand around her breast and thumb across her nipple, he gives up all resistance.

With a small groan from the stretch that goes straight to John’s groin, Moran opens the drawer of her bedside table and retrieves a condom. She rips it open with her teeth and rolls it on with one hand, shoving John’s pants down his legs with the other.

He groans the moment her lips touch his cock, tongue darting out and licking upwards before she finally takes the head in her mouth and sucks.

John cries out and arches back and then he feels the gun’s barrel teasing his inner thigh and his hands scramble frantically at the sheets for something to hold on to. Moran’s right hand strokes firmly at the base of his prick, pulling upwards to meet her mouth as she drags the gun backwards and presses it up the line of John’s arse.

John’s mouth opens in a gasp he can’t even manage. He hadn’t intended this – he’d wanted to push Moran gently into the bed and thank her for everything and kiss her, to turn everything quiet save gasps and moans and sighs, but this, _this –_ he should have known that he’d be forced to be unorthodox, that there was going to be something, that he’d hear his blood in his ears and be so eager for it that he was near ready to throw himself from the bed.

Her index finger presses gently against his hole, and coinciding with a hard suck that has his prick hitting the roof of her mouth, she pushes inward and works him open, replacing her fingers very quickly with the tip of the gun and _oh_. And staring down at her shoulder blades suddenly he is not thinking of her at all, he’s thinking—he’s thinking—

“Shhhh—” John bites back against the word so he will not say it. Moran pauses in her blow job, sliding off and pressing a small kiss against him instead. John whines.

“Come on, John,” Moran says, voice lilting, deep with arousal, clever fingers dancing along his inner thighs in small circles. She nuzzles John’s spit-slicked prick with her nose. “I know you’ve been dying to say it,” – she takes one of John’s balls gently into her mouth and sucks – “clever boy.”

“No, I—” John arches closer to her mouth and she darts away like a cat; he feels like he’s maybe having trouble breathing. Her tongue presses carefully at the base of his cock; he watches dark hair lick back towards his perineum. “I won’t, I—Sherlo—oh, god, Sher—I— _Sherlock—“_

Moran smiles like she’s proud as she takes John’s prick back into her mouth and he _moans,_ hands twisting into fists, and it’s not even that she looks like him but she’s dangerous, and she talks like him, and sometimes she seems to wear similar shirts—

She abandons the gun, leaving it sticking obscenely out of him as she reaches down to fuck herself open with her fingers, kissing at John’s thighs and rubbing her nose into his dark tuft of pubic hair. “That’s right,” she says, biting at his hip before pulling herself up and positioning herself over his prick, “oh, I wish I were you.” She hisses as she sinks onto John and he’s gone, bucking upwards into her with nothing more than a sharp ‘ah!’ that pierces loudly through the room.

“Do I remind you of him?” she asks, squirming over his cock and thrusting the gun deeper inside him so John’s head falls back and he can barely breathe. “Am I a dark little angel? Just like your lovely—” she thrusts, “consulting—” again, and John whines—“ _detective?”_

John mouths wordlessly like a fish out of water and his vision goes nearly white as he comes.

*

“I envy you,” she says quietly, when it’s over. She’s wrapped herself in the tangled bedsheet. She rests her chin on John’s left pectoral and traces absently at his scar. “When you look at me, you see him, and when I look at you—” She stops herself, and John lifts his head up to show that he’s listening. He’s not quite sure what expression to wear. Usually he’s fairly smiley and contented after sex, but that doesn’t feel very appropriate. “I see me.”

*

John stares up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. “How did you know he was a consulting detective?”

Moran has already fallen asleep.

*

Two months. They make it two more months.

They don’t talk about it, and John goes back to sleeping on the sofa. But if, once or twice, he felt the compulsion to press his lips against Moran’s ear or the nape of her neck, she did not complain. Sometimes he’d feel her fingers in his hair as she passed, and that’s all. They weren’t frequently together in the flat, and if they did go out on jobs together, it was the same as it always was. John liked that. And then:

“Listen, I’m going to have to set the flat on fire.”

“What?” He’s used to completely ludicrous propositions by now, but she couldn’t possibly mean that—

“I’m going to Brazil, I’m not coming back to this flat. I’ve stayed here too long as it is. I’m setting it on fire.”

“But you are—you are coming back. To London.” Somehow this seems exceedingly more important than the fact that the place where they currently both live might soon be a site of arson. 

“Of _course_ I’m coming back to London,” as if any other option is completely out of the question. Then again, for John, any other option _is_ completely out of the question. He shouldn’t be surprised that for her, it’s the same. “I just don’t think it’s safe here. It’s important to move around, especially when we know there’s a threat.” 

“True enough.” 

“And you’re alright?” she says. “With this.” 

“Yeah, it’s fine,” John says, standing up and crossing the room to pick up his duffel bag. He is more surprised than he should be when he sees that it’s almost entirely empty, that his belongings have scattered themselves across the flat and likely doubled. “I’ll find a new place to live. We can go back to sharing when you get back.” 

“Good.” 

There’s quiet, and John starts fluttering around the living room, looking for stray socks and shirts. Moran helps him like she’s nervous, puts things in the duffel bag like it’s difficult to approach, and, when he’s finished, hovers on the other side of the room as if her avoidance of him isn’t dead obvious. 

John hoists his bag onto his shoulder. He feels like he should say something, but he has no idea what. “Need any help starting the fire?”

“No, of course not.”

John licks his lips; he bounces up slightly on the balls of his feet. “And how long are you going to be gone?”

Moran turns, and she really looks at him, and after staring for a moment she squeezes her eyes shut as if she’s trying to take a picture.

“Two weeks.”

John smiles, tight-lipped. He tries not to betray the fact that he’s worried. “See you when you get back, then.”

“Yes.”

John closes the door.

*

Two weeks. Three.

John asks Adair over drinks after their card game.

“Jesus, weren’t you two close? I thought you knew. I heard she was smothered. Either that or some… fiery explosion, you know the type. Ages ago. South America. She wasn’t very well-liked there.”

John’s laugh is hollow. “We don’t really have the most personable profession.”

“Well,” Adair says, “there you are.”

*

He kills someone for the hell of it on the way back to his flat.

*

Three days after he first hears the rumors of Moran’s death, an egg crate full of manila envelopes and file folders shows up on his doorstep. He heaves it into his shabby living room and places it between his legs, lighting a cigarette to smoke as he reads. He opens several up at ones, gauging the difficulty of the hits, how well they pay, where they are located, if he’d be able to complete several in a day.

He pauses, halfway through, to look at the uniform assignment sheets stapled to the tops of all the packets. He flips through the targets, reading only the name in the ‘Assigned Operative’ box at the top of the forms.

_Moran, Moran, Moran, Moran._

*

Sometimes, when he’s sure that no one’s listening, even though it’s bonkers to think that someone can hear inside your own head, he imagines that Moran’s not actually dead. That she hasn’t been killed by a heartless hit man whose next target will be John himself in a matter of time. No. Sometimes he thinks that she’s found somewhere safe – not quiet, but safe – somewhere to lie low, somewhere loud where all the sound will cover her. Somewhere with street vendors and easily accessible guns. Somewhere she will love, that will keep her gainfully employed. India. Hunting tigers.

He avoids thinking about these things because it is a waste to idle away time and thought on sentimentality. But, as he’d told himself. Sometimes.

*

He starts calling himself Moran when he checks into hotels, both for continuity’s sake and simply because he notices that this way, more people seem to be afraid of him. The third time he does this, his mobile buzzes in his pocket. He has a text from a restricted number.

                _Catch on quick, don’t you boy?_

_xx Jim_

The message pleases him, somehow. He slips his phone back into his pocket.

*

“Give me your winnings,” Adair says.

“What? From what?”

“Tonight.”

“Have you gone mad?”

“Give me your winnings from tonight, or I walk right back in there and tell them all that you’ve been cheating them out of their cash since you first started coming.

John gives Adair the money. It’s not an exceedingly large sum, anyway.

*

Spiteful to a fault, John goes back in to the tables to try and win back what he’s lost and he loses, he loses, he loses, he loses.

*

What he should have done:

Adair, the prickish git, has a ritual for counting his money and going over his books after gambling. It’s one of the largest differences between John and himself: he always accounts for his losses and he always makes sure to break even, measuring his profits over the course of his entire career. He was careful with his money and he knew how to play, as if he’d had an equally prickish father who wore a smoking jacket and taught him to play poker at age twelve, at their country estate.

On Wednesday evenings, at half past four, just after his mother has completed her weekly visits, Adair locks himself in his study and counts. He leaves his window open. John would hide in one of the unpopulated rooms of the Cavendish House – a former whist club, rife with poetic justice – and take the shot with an air rifle the moment that Adair stood up to cross the room. He would leave the scene, quick and quiet, perhaps lie low abroad for a few months until the case blew over. Maybe go to Spain. He had liked Spain. Or India.

Furthermore, he could have just stopped altogether. Severed ties with Adair and gambling and all of England and accepted that he’d been robbed of a couple hundred pounds that he didn’t rightfully win in the first place.

Instead, John arms himself with three different knives and his best handgun before storming over to Adair’s in a smoking fury. It is a Saturday, late. On his way into the flat complex, he passes by a woman walking a Dalmatian and wishes her a cordial ‘good evening.’ He takes the stairs up to Adair’s floor, and pauses before knocking.                                                                                                                     

John dons his leather gloves.

His thinks of how, once, Moran had told him of how she had hunted tigers.

“John!” Adair says, guileless, “this is a surprise! I didn’t think, I—Well!”

“I looked up your address in the phone book,” John says, even though he’s known where Adair lives for several months.

“Of course. Come in; wipe your shoes on the mat, if you don’t mind.”

John tracks mud directly onto Adair’s carpet. Ron gives him a strained smile.

“What brings you here?” he asks, but he doesn’t give him time to answer. John cannot tell if Adair’s sudden anxiety makes him look too old or too young. “Listen—no sore feelings about the money, right? That was just a lark, I won’t do it again, I know from certain perspectives it could have seen _slightly_ underhanded, but nothing – and God knows I like winning the money as much as you, but all the same—”

“No,” John says, shaking his head and crossing his hands behind his back. The door is still ajar behind him. He pauses, to turn, to close it.

“Come on, now, John, this isn’t—you’re not—”

John takes out one of his knives. 

“Oh, come on! Calm down! Be reasonable, you, you—!” 

John pulls his handgun from his right back pocket and holds it directly to Adair’s forehead. “Now listen to me,” he says, he voice quiet and cold, “you make one more sound and your life’s going to be over faster than you can say ‘suicide king’, you understand?”

Adair nods. He backs up and until he’s against the nearest wall, pawing frantically at his desk, sending magazines down to the floor at his feet. The mirror mounted there makes everything seem so surreal, with John able to see his own reflection, the back of Adair’s head.

John advances. He can hear Adair, who’s just a kid, really, whimpering.

“If you cooperate,” John says, “I’ll finish our business and leave without ever coming back to bother you again. You won’t gamble anymore. You won’t move in my circle.”

Adair nods again. John’s upon him, and he dances the blade of the knife across Adair’s freckled skin. He hadn’t noticed the freckles until he was up this close. Such a shame, getting to know a person only in the dim light of a club and a bar. As he glances the blade across Ron’s face, the tip nicks the bridge of his nose. Adair closes his eyes as if in prayer.

“Don’t worry, now,” John coos, “I’m a doctor.”

*

He ends up killing Adair anyway. He hadn’t stood a chance from the first incision, of course, because he couldn’t do something so tedious as go running to the police, but in the end, he hadn’t been able to withstand the knife across his face without giving up and crying for help.

The gunshot had been too loud, but John makes it out of the place quickly enough. Running down the street, he passes the blonde walking her Dalmatian, but he decides that he doesn’t have enough time to worry about her.

*

John turns on the telly for background noise, a habit he’s gotten into since he hasn’t had anyone to share a flat with. He takes the leftover Indian from out of his fridge and listens to the mindless babble of adverts and news reports coming from the next room over before his ears prick and his heart shudders in his chest.

“—Ronald Alexander Adair, government official, found dead in his home by his sister just a few hours after his death from a bullet wound and multiple incisions to his—”

John drops his takeout carton. That can’t be right. He’s not sure if he’s heard anything at all.

He crosses into the next room and lowers himself unsurely onto the torn apart sofa, the stuffing sticking out next to him. His hand is shaking. There’s a weak, painful ache in his leg.

“Joining us is the newly reinstated Detective Inspector Lestrade, who is here to discuss the case as well as his recent restoration to the D.I. position, which is subsequent to the highly-contested return of consulting de—” 

John turns off the television. He sticks his head between his legs. 

“Fuck,” he says, breath shaking, and it’s like everything he’s ever done is closing in on him, like his insides are being devoured by wolves. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

*

For a man he’s been working for for nearly three years, Jim Moriarty is incredibly difficult to find.

*

“Sliced up like a _tiger_ ,” says a sing-song voice from nowhere, echoing through the abandoned office building that John has only just barely managed to find on the outskirts of London, “now, that’s _inspired._ Face. Torso. Truly. Couldn’t have thought of anything prettier. I would know, I’ve seen the pictures. Exquisite detailing, really. And you said that you weren’t murderous.”

He appears out of a dark corner, in a black suit, this time, a red bow tie. He tweaks on it. “Thought it was fitting for the occasion. A bit of a tribute, you see. When I get a bit closer you can look at my cuff links.” He speaks like he’s telling a hilarious story in a language that John doesn’t understand, like he can only just contain himself. John stares at the floor and stands at parade rest. 

“You should have seen how funny it was, watching you chase around London, looking for me,” and John can hear his footsteps coming closer but he does not look up. “It was a real lark. I love when people come looking for me. They’re so desperate. Prepared to do just about _anything._ ” 

Jim shows John his cuff links. They’re tigers. John thinks that he may be sick. 

“Step into my office,” Jim says, and for a moment John forgets to be scared because he’s so shocked to think that a building like this actually contains an office. 

But it does, and Jim practically skips there, opening the door and revealing a room that wouldn’t look out of place on a University campus. There’s something eerie about the classy ornateness of it – the sheer amount of oriental carpets and hardwood, the mahogany desk, the candelabras and bookshelves – does not give off an air of ‘Jim Moriarty’ at all. 

“So, Johnny-boy,” Jim continues, leading him in, occasionally tapping him on his sides to encourage him further into the room but never truly touching, “what do you need Jim to fix for you today?” He takes several steps away from John, he goes to the window and touches the curtain as if it’s in need of examination.

John waits before speaking, because he’s not quite sure if he’s allowed to. 

“Jim, come on—” John’s upper lip is sweating. Moriarty whips around and advances, hands behind his back, taking slow strides toward John until finally their feet are nearly on top of each other. John does not step back, but he doesn’t raise his gaze to look at him, either.

“Are you scared, John?” Moriarty crooks his long index finger and slides it beneath John’s chin. He raises John’s head for him, forces their eyes to meet. John realises he’s breathing rather fast. “Do you find yourself a little afraid of Mr. Moriarty? Or is it the law? Are you afraid of being arrested? Are you afraid of having no one to depend on but me?” 

Jim’s free hand pets its way forward and rests at the base of John’s Browning, holstered at his waist. He strokes it gently, looking down to contemplate it with pursed lips. 

“You can say yes, Johnny-boy,” Jim says, and he gives up the gun in order to take John’s head in both his hands like a prized dog. “I won’t punish you.” 

John doesn’t say anything. 

“I can fix this for you, you know. I’ll make it go away. I like you, you’re a good boy. I understand that my pets aren’t as smart as me. I know that sometimes, you can act… rashly.” He forms the last word in his mouth slowly, like he’s not quite sure if he’s using the right one. He crawls his hands, like enormous spiders, down John’s neck and across his chest. He latches on around John’s waist and then slides his right hand up John’s stomach, beneath his shirt. 

“Thank you,” John says, because Moriarty is smiling at him as if waiting for him to say something. “Thank you, I’m sorry, thank—” 

“But you’re going to have to do me a favor. I’d ask you to pay me, but I’ve heard you’ve earned yourself some _awful_ gambling debts…” 

“I’ll do a job for you. Any job. You know that, you—”

Moriarty nods, then turns away from him, hand sliding listlessly off John’s skin as though bored. He saunters back to the other side of the room, pulls a key from an inner pocket in his suit jacket, and unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk.

John can only just remember what the old Moriarty looked like, and he knows that they are distinctly different, but he cannot help but feel that there is an eerie sense of identicalness to the way that they both move.

“Baker Street,” Jim says as he crosses the room again, and the name echoes in John’s head with a horrifying sense of familiarity. Like hearing the name of an old school friend, or dead lover. “Two twenty-one B Baker Street, in fact.” Jim hands him a manila envelope. John makes to open it, but Jim waggles a finger at him and he tucks it under his arm, instead. Looking pleased, Jim laces his hands behind his back.

“Vacant since you left it three years ago.” Jim smiles, and John is filled with a sudden uneasiness that he isn’t being told something.

“And?”

“And we would like it to remain so. Someone’s taken it, you see,” he says, and he bounces up on the balls of his feet, still smiling, “someone who’s been causing trouble for quite some time, we’ve only just managed to find them again. My predecessor always thought that his death deserved to be… interesting, full of… _poetry…”_   Jim trails off, sneers. “I don’t. There’s an empty house across the street you can use to take the shot.” His tone is businesslike, clipped, and he keeps glancing up towards the ceiling as if trying very hard to remember something.

“The tenant’s just moved in, so with luck no one will be looking for him.” Jim walks away from him again, and this time, he takes a seat at his desk and opens his laptop. John readies himself to be dismissed, and realises that he’s been standing at parade rest this entire time, barely breathing.

“You may go.” Jim gives John a noncommittal wave but does not take his eyes off of him, instead threading his fingers together and resting his chin on them as he watches. John tries not to walk too quickly to the door.

Moriarty speaks again when John touches the handle. “Oh, and John?” 

John’s neck prickles and he squeezes his eyes shut, getting the feeling that Moriarty has been waiting for this moment for the extent of their conversation.

John turns. “Yes?” 

“Don’t open the envelope until after you’ve taken the shot.”

John tries not to let his surprise show on his face. He doesn’t manage it, judging by Moriarty’s pleased smile, but he doesn’t particularly care.

“Understood.”

*

The task he’s been assigned is almost painfully easy, he can think of at least ten more difficult jobs off the top of his head. He doesn’t even need to pick the lock to get into the house, the door swings right open. Expecting, then, something of an ambush, John pulls out his Browning, but there’s nothing. No one around, no police. Just an empty house.

The fact that Jim’s given him such a simple task as payment for framing someone for murder unnerves him, but as he climbs the stairs, he wonders if this is perhaps because he’s done so much for the organization already. Perhaps this is just a formality. The longer he thinks about it, the more sense it makes.

Most of the windows have been boarded up on the first floor, and when he gets to the second, if they’re not boarded off they’re so pathetically dirty that they’re near impossible to see through anyway.  There’s a rustle beneath his feet, and John looks down to see he’s walking on newspapers – save a dilapidated sofa near the back of the room, the house appears to have never been inhabited at all. The dark and the quiet give everything an ominous hush of dying, and John treads lightly despite the fact that he knows he does not need to; he walks in the shadows and he holds his breath.

John makes a beeline for what is blatantly the most advantageous window and slides his bag off his shoulder, removing his rifle and slipping the barrel of it onto the sill.  He supports the butt with his knee as he reaches into his bag to assemble the stand, cracking open the window with his free hand so he can slide the barrel out further. He does so quietly and efficiently, despite the dark. He’s had a great deal of practice over the past three years.

The manila envelope from his meeting with Jim is just inside his jacket, and curiosity in him burns anew. He’d spent all night staring at it as it lay on his desk, trying to resist temptation. He takes it out and lays it down beside him, wondering if he’s close enough to taking the shot now that he can just give up the ghost and look. It’s not like anyone would know. It also barely makes sense: the assignment is in there, it must be. The profile of his victim, protocol if the target becomes suspicious. Why wait until _after_ the target is dead to read the materials? Why give him the materials at all? 

But there’s a reason. There’s clearly some sort of reasonthat Jim wants it done this way, and he will follow his orders and not have to deal with a murder charge and get his life back to the way that he likes it. 

He already knows what he’s going to do once he completes the hit: he’ll take the gun to the roof and burn it, then flee from the scene down the fire escape. Everything is standard procedure. He needs to stop looking over his shoulder.

Hands perfectly steady, he peers through the sight and gets his first glimpse of Baker Street in over two years. 

It looks, unsurprisingly, exactly the same. It makes an old part of John stunningly sad, to think that the flat hasn’t moved on while he has. The notion, of course, is ridiculous and sentimental, but other than the grime on the windows, it looks utterly unchanged.

Grime on the windows. Mrs. Hudson must be gone, then, or perhaps simply sick of taking care of it. Perhaps someone bought it, and then let it atrophy.  Not that it matters. John gives his head a small shake. He scans the windows, looking for any sign of a body— 

And then it seems _so_ easy that now John is horrified, adrenaline rushing, because there’s the man who John assumes to be the target, standing in the window. Not even meandering about, just looking down at the street, he’s a sitting duck, John can see that he’s tall and thin with dark hair, and he looks, he looks—

John looks down at the envelope one more time.

He’s tackled to the ground an instant later. 

Instinct kicks in – the assailant is shouting, and John punches him swiftly in the face.  It’s so dark that John cannot even tell if this is police or rival sniper or vigilante, and he doesn’t particularly care – he’s being wrestled to the ground again, hips straddled, and he bucks up, punches just below the ribs to gain the upper hand again, but he finds himself being folded almost in half as his legs are grabbed from underneath him. He’s scrambling for some form of freedom as he kicks out against the hold when his hearing turns back on and it dawns on him that his attacker is still talking:

“—honestly think, that _this,_ with just a—a common—I knew,I _knew_  the moment I returned there’d be an attempt on my life, does he take me for an idiot, does he take—does he take me—?”

Bony hands find their way around John’s neck and he chokes, trying to roll away and failing. He bucks again, and something hard juts into his hip when he hits the ground. Cursing himself for not thinking of it sooner, for needing a bloody _reminder_ , he reaches his left hand easily to his holster, flicks the safety off with his thumb, and holds the Browning to the assailant’s throat.

“Let go of me, I swear to god,” John says, pressing the gun straight into the man’s jugular without any inhibition, hoping it bruises. He supports himself on his elbow, he waits.

Hesitantly, the man releases him and begins to ease his weight off of John, hands up. John follows him up, vision still dark around the edges and feeling lightheaded in a drunken way that isn’t pleasant at all. He peers at the stranger through the dimness. John can barely see his features, but he looks— _scared._

The man leans back, just half an inch further, into the light.

John’s mouth goes dry.

**Author's Note:**

> True to form, [Brodie](http://finnemores.tumblr.com/) made an exquisite [photoset](http://finnemores.tumblr.com/post/40010880121/modus-operandi-joolabee-youd-do) (graphic?) that I am speechlessly in love with
> 
> [Melody went to New Cavendish Street](http://ineffableboyfriends.tumblr.com/post/40179034402/julia-i-went-there-just-to-show-you-ok-no-real)
> 
> [Breathtaking cover](http://glowingbunny.tumblr.com/post/41474007054/) by Alicia
> 
> [Gorgeous edit](http://loopingstate.tumblr.com/post/41498294727/modus-operandi-by-joolabee) by Anna
> 
> [THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND BADASS DRAWS I'VE EVER SEEN BY INDY](http://indyfalcon.tumblr.com/post/42293119057/hey-look-its-that-thing-i-drew-instead-of)
> 
> [More art](http://indyfalcon.tumblr.com/post/49034660148/rereading-modus-operandi-and-doing-my-mixed-media) by [Indy](http://indyfalcon.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> [Fanart by Lyd that is the embodiment of sex on legs](http://detectivelyd.tumblr.com/post/52746423491/full-size-deviantart-john-from-modus-operandi)
> 
>  
> 
> [Fanart](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/post/53882465245/have-you-read-modus-operandi-read-modus-operandi) by [Ellery](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/) of one of my favorite scenes #bye
> 
> [Ellery](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/) also drew [Modus' incarnation of Moran!](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/post/53996920502/)
> 
> [Two other crazy great covers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1158706) by bbcsjohnlock


End file.
